All Insights Articles

A document from 1787 Holland lists the names of girls whose income from government annuities was pooled and securitized, allowing investors to essentially bet that the girls would live a long time. Yale SOM Professors Will Goetzmann and Geert Rouwenhorst discuss how this novel financial device functioned and how it fits in the story of the development of more and more sophisticated securities.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Air invades emptiness. Water floods open space. What happens when a wall is breached and markets are allowed to enter countries where they’d previously been banned? In the 1990s, Rosemary Ripley participated in the infusion of private enterprise into former command economies.

Joseph S. Fichera proposes an innovative way to make corporate directors more independent and effective by providing them with better information.

Steve LaVoie founded Arrowstream to improve supply-chain management in the restaurant business. He discovered that the benefits of trust in markets have been overlooked, in part because of an overemphasis on individual actors as opposed to relationships. He also learned that building and maintaining trust is hard work.

A market is a place (virtual or tangible) where buyers and sellers meet. Markets exist everywhere people do. But each market has its particular customs, as simple as a handshake or as intricate as a 40-page contract.

A loan might allow you to buy a bike to commute to a new job or to nurse your business through an unexpected setback. But billions of people around the world have little or no access to financial markets. Microfinance is one potential solution to this dilemma.

Markets bend to forces on the immense scale of macroeconomics. But they’re also nudged, poked, and even redirected by the individuals who work in them. In a 20-plus-year career, Teresa Barger has hit nearly every financial sector and every continent.

Legendary investor Martin Whitman describes the factors that push markets toward efficiency — and how inefficiency presents opportunities for investors.

The airwaves are a precious commodity. More than 200 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S. alone chat and bat text messages across the wireless spectrum. When Reed Hundt was chairman of the FCC, he implemented the first auctions of this resource, opening the way for industry development and raising revenue for the government. Hundt recently talked with Professor Barry Nalebuff, describing what he learned about auction markets and how he might use an auction to save the environment. Of course, they spoke via cell phone.