The blossoming of work on asymmetric information and principal-agent theory, led by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof and with contributions from many other researchers, gave economists the tools to think about the central role of financial markets in the real economy.
For example, the classic 1976 paper by Michael Jensen and William Meckling showed that, in a world of imperfect information and principal-agent problems, the capital structure of the firm could be used as a tool by shareholders to better align the incentives of managers with the shareholders' interests.