Crowdfunding is a new and popular way of funding innovative products. Despite numerous advantages, there are challenges to this model, chief among them credibly signaling information about product quality to a pool of small, uninformed investors. We explore how an entrepreneur might accomplish...

The authors present empirical evidence that borrowers, consciously or not, leave traces of their intentions, circumstances, and personality traits in the text they write when applying for a loan. This textual information has a substantial and significant ability to predict whether borrowers will...

By imposing a market like governance and directing entrepreneurs towards professional management, debt, and especially business debt, can serve as a reliable signal for outside equity investors. Such signals of firm accountability can alleviate the stringent information asymmetry at the early...

Lobbying is a potential source of corruption but is also a valuable source of information for policymakers. We analyze a game-theoretic model that shows how the threat of corruption affects the incentives of non-corrupt politicians to enlist the help of lobbyists to make more informed decisions....

This paper studies the effect of inter-entrepreneurial productivity variation on investment under asymmetric information and signalling in the credit market. When productivity is not sufficiently dispersed, safe-type entrepreneurs face borrowing constraints and might under- or over-invest...

We consider a multi-receiver Bayesian persuasion problem where an informed sender tries to persuade a group of receivers to adopt a certain product. The sender is allowed to commit to a signaling policy where she sends a private signal to every receiver. The utility of the sender is a function...

We examine the relationship between signals derived from unstructured social media microblog text data and financial market developments. Employing statistical language modeling techniques we construct directional user sentiment and non-directional topic disagreement metrics and link these to...

I study the information content of corporate insiders' purchases when their firms experience sharp increases in short interest. Insider purchases mitigate the negative impact of short selling on stock prices, but this effect is temporary and reverts within one year. The cumulative abnormal...

We examine whether a put-call ratio, derived from a unique set of market data, can be used to predict directional moves in asset prices during various market conditions between March 2005 and December 2012. Our findings show: 1) specific market participant's options trading volume is a...

This paper examines the liquidity, Tobin's Q, and cost of equity effects from voluntary and mandatory IFRS adoption. In contrast to prior work, we focus on the firm level heterogeneity in the economic consequences, recognising that the level of uncertainty avoidance (UAI) in a country will...