India has more than a sixth of the world’s population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race. For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the ...

The stock market’s longstanding skepticism about official real-estate valuations just got fresh support from a jumbo writedown at one of Britain’s biggest mall and office operators. Hammerson Plc’s results are yet again catching up with its depressed share price. The company resisted a takeover bid in 2018 by pointing out that its reported net asset value was higher than the ...

One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,” which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do. The first risk is that social impact investing ...