Hot on the heels of yesterday's post, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, chaired by Alan Milburn, have released their first annual report. BBC coverage of the report is here. The findings are stark. First, real incomes have been flat-lining for a long time, meanwhile prices have been going up. Second, for the first time in over a century, the current generation of children are going to be worse off than their parents. Third, social mobility (i.e., the ability of people to better their lives and those of their offspring) is dying. For me, the big question is do politicians really care about this issue? If so, what can they do about it?
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...