Vox have just released an e-book entitled Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures. The list of contributors is impressive - Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, Barry Eichengreen, Edward Glaesar, Nick Crafts, Joel Mokyr are just some of the authors. The book's summary is here. The workable definition of secular stagnation which emerges from the book is "that negative real interest rates are needed to equate saving and investment with full employment." The main concern of the authors is "that secular stagnation makes it harder to achieve full employment with low inflation and a zero lower bound on policy interest rates."
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...