I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.
Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.
During my undergraduate training at UCLA, I was studying finance and securities; my particular interest was with mutual funds. Wanting to get into a high position at some of the companies that were doing that, I knew that law would be useful.
The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.
The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.
What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it.
You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box...
More retirees, longer life expectancy, larger benefits, and fewer workers - these trends have meant substantial increases in the payroll tax. Since the social security program began, the payroll tax has increased more than 500 percent.
When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adoles...
Don't have work-life balance - at least in the sense of trying to escape from work so you can have a life. Work should be fun - so make work enjoyable and satisfying for everyone - among other reasons because it pays off.
There are too many countries where the values we take for granted in our civil servants simply do not exist. Seeing these values in action, applied with dedication by hardworking individuals, makes me proud to lead a service that is making life bette...
We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.
As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.
This is the choice in life. You choose what is less bad. I don't particularly like Mr. Obama, but I think he is less bad for the world than Mr. Romney. It is a tragedy of life that both candidates did not lose the election. They would have deserved b...
I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.
With 'GoldenEye,' the franchise got locked into this legal fight. They couldn't make new Bond movies for about seven years. It was my first huge production. I figured if I did at least a yeoman-like job, it would be greeted as a complete revival of t...
My personality has two sides: a very social side and a reclusive side. I love writing fiction, although I can't imagine ever being locked up in a room writing all the time.
My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies.
The reason why Botswana has done very well is because it's the only black African country which went back to its roots and built upon its own indigenous institutions.
And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.
The goal of long-run economic growth without asset price bubbles is not only achievable, but is something we should expect if we put a sound regulatory framework in place and if policymakers remain vigilant.
