Corporate Finance.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

NBER's Program on Corporate Finance met in Chicago on April 25. Atif Mian, NBER and University of Chicago, and Manju Puri, NBER and Duke University, organized this agenda:

Raghuram G. Rajan, University of Chicago and NBER, and Rodney Ramcharan, International Monetary Fund, "Landed Interests and Financial Underdevelopment in the United States"

Discussant: Shawn Cole, Harvard University

Vojislav Maksimovic and N.R. Phabhala, University of Maryland, and Gordon Phillips, University of Maryland and NBER, "Post-Merger, Restructuring and the Boundaries of the Firm"

Discussant: Murillo Campello, University of Illinois

Lucian A. Bebchuk, Harvard University and NBER; Martijn Cremers, Yale University; and Urs Peyer, INSEAD, "CEO Centrality"

Discussant: Rajesh Aggarwal, University of Minnesota

Robin Greenwood and Samuel Hanson, Harvard University, and Jeremy C. Stein, Harvard University and NBER, "A Gap-Filling Theory of Corporate Debt Maturity Choice"

Discussant: Adriano Rampini, Duke University

Christopher Mayer, Columbia University and NBER; Tomasz Piskorski, Columbia University; and Alexei Tchistyi, New York University, "The Inefficiency of Refinancing: Why Prepayment Penalties Are Good for Risky Borrowers"

Discussant: Bruce Carlin, UC, Los Angeles

Benjamin Keys, University of Michigan; Tanmoy Mukherjee, Sorin Capital Management; Amit Seru, University of Chicago; and Vikrant Vig, London Business School, "Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence From Subprime Loans"

Discussant: Daniel Bergstresser, Harvard University

Atif Mian, and Amir Sufi, University of Chicago, "The Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion: Evidence from the 2007 Mortgage Default Crisis" (NBER Working Paper No. 13936--See "Risks of Financial Institutions" earlier in this issue for a description of this paper.)

Discussant: Nicholas Souleles, University of Pennsylvania and NBER

It is usually thought that the wealthy have an ability to limit wider access to economic institutions only in poor, undemocratic countries. Rajan and Ramcharan find that even in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century, landed interests seem to play a significant role in the spread of financial institutions. Counties with very concentrated land holdings tended to have disproportionately fewer banks per capita and fewer national banks. Moreover, aggregating land distribution up to the state level, states that had higher land concentration passed more restrictive banking...