Michael Ewens

Michael Ewens, Jacob Faber

This paper examines the economics of providing retail investors access to private markets, analyzing how liquid fund structures interact with illiquid underlying assets. We study the trade-offs between democratized access to private equity and venture capital investments and the costs imposed by liquidity transformation, including potential return dilution and structural risks.

Michael Ewens, Xavier Giroud

This paper examines how to measure corporate hierarchy and its economic consequences for firms. We introduce a novel measure of hierarchical layers, derived from 7 million online employee resumes and a network estimation technique, and use it to document several facts about organizational structure, performance, and adjustment to shocks. The findings show that more hierarchical firms exhibit higher operating performance but also higher administrative costs, and they adjust their structure differently in response to economic changes.