Skip to main content

Books for Students

What books should students of economics and finance read? FIVE has an interview with John Kay, where he recommends five books that every student of economics and finance should buy and read. I can endorse two of his recommendations -  Germs, Guns, and Steel by Jared Diamond and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. Indeed, these two books should be read by anyone with an interest in economic development and economics.

Popular posts from this blog

How Valuable Are Connections?

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...

The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry

Michael Aldous and I had our book The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry published a few weeks ago. You can find out more about it and buy it at Cambridge University Press's website . It is also available at Amazon , Waterstones , and Barnes & Noble .  The CEO has already been reviewed in The Sunday Times , The Observer and Financial Times .

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press .