The public debate about same-sex marriage has raised some really interesting questions about the nature and rationale of marriage. Marriage is an institution which we observe across space and time, but why do we have marriage and why has it been so prevalent across societies? Marriage in the West has been eroded over the past number of decades and many see the extension of the marriage franchise to same-sex couples as a further weakening of the institution. Unfortunately, much of the debate on this issue is being stifled and sometimes there is more heat than light. However, I recently came across a really good debate on Piers Morgan's CNN show, which featured Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in the United States.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...