Ben Bernanke stepped down as Chairman of the Federal Reserve on Friday. So what will be his legacy? Bernanke, although he didn't anticipate the financial crisis, steered the Fed through the most turbulent of financial environments since the Great Depression. Notably, as an academic, Bernanke was probably best known for his work on the Great Depression. His key insight was that the collapse of banks during the Great Depression resulted in credit channels not working properly. How well did he steer the Fed over the past eight years? You can read articles where Bernanke's performance is assessed at the WSJ, Project Syndicate and PBS.
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...