This year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics is Jean Tirole. Tirole is best known as someone who has formalised (in a mathematical sense) key concepts in microeconomics and industrial organisation. Click here to read Tyler Cowen's comprehensive post on Tirole's contribution to economics. Tirole played a large role in my education. I read / studied two of his books during my graduate studies - The Theory of Industrial Organization (1988) and The Prudential Regulation of Banks (1994). Notably, both of these books have stood the test of time - as will his book The Theory of Corporate Finance (2006).
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...