Jackie Wilbur on the Master of Finance Program: Confronting Global Challenges

In the last few months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought a lot of attention to the finance industry. However, MIT’s Sloan School of Management has been focused on this area for over 40 years. Our finance faculty have been conducting cutting-edge research, and rigorously teaching our students, ensuring that our finance students are […]

Erik Brynjolfsson: New e-book outlines promise and peril of digital revolution

From Economics of Information Blog Andy McAfee and I have just released a short e-book, Race Against the Machine. In it, we try to reconcile two important facts. 1) Technology continues to progress rapidly. In fact, the past decade has seen the fastest productivity growth since the 1960s, but 2) median wages and employment have both […]

Corporations hoard cash as a precautionary measure

Academic studies have shown that over the past few decades, public firms are increasingly holding large amounts of cash. Curiously, much of this build up in cash savings can be attributed to cash saved from seasoned share issues, which are sales of equity by already public companies. I examined the share-issuance cash savings of a […]

Yasheng Huang On China’s growth

From Forbes India There’s news of widespread corporate fraud among companies listed on overseas stock exchanges, even as the macroeconomic picture gets worrisome It is dizzying how fast and how far the sentiments about China have changed. In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, Western analysts then hailed Chinese response as daring, visionary and […]

Defaulting to big government—the unintended consequences of not raising the debt ceiling

From CNN World Leading United States congressmen are determined to provoke a showdown with the Obama administration over the federal government’s debt ceiling. Ordinarily, you might expect House Republicans to blink at this stage of the negotiations, but there is a hardline minority that actually appears to think that defaulting on government debt would not […]