TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lerner, Josh
AU  - Tufano, Peter
TI  - The Consequences of Financial Innovation: A Counterfactual Research Agenda
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16780
PY  - 2011
Y2  - February 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w16780
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16780
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16780.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Josh Lerner
Harvard Business School
Rock Center 214
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6065
Fax: 617/496-7357
E-Mail: jlerner@hbs.edu

Peter Tufano
Peter Moores Dean
University of Oxford
Saïd Business School
Park End Street
Oxford OX1 1HP UK
Tel: +1 44(0) 1865 288 812
E-Mail: peter.tufano@sbs.ox.ac.uk
M1  - published as Josh Lerner, Peter Tufano. "The Consequences of Financial Innovation: A Counterfactual Research Agenda," in Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, editors, "The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited" University of Chicago Press (2012)

AB  - Financial innovation has been both praised as the engine of growth of society and castigated for being the source of the weakness of the economy. In this paper, we review the literature on financial innovation and highlight the similarities and differences between financial innovation and other forms of innovation. We also propose a research agenda to systematically address the social welfare implications of financial innovation. To complement existing empirical and theoretical methods, we propose that scholars examine case studies of systemic (widely adopted) innovations, explicitly considering counterfactual histories had the innovations never been invented or adopted.
ER  -