I use microdata from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to study whether the cost of acquiring health information is an important determinant of the decision to buy private hospital health insurance for individuals aged 50+, in eight European countries. I first test whether,...

This paper considers a network industry characterized by an upstream natural monopoly with cost uncertainty, regulated through an access price mechanism, and an unregulated downstream market with Cournot competition. The upstream monopolist can acquire information on the upstream cost while the...

In this paper we study the delegation of monetary policy to independent central bankers in a two country world with monetary spill-overs. The paper shows that under imperfect commitment and private information of the Central Bankers about their objectives the optimal degree of commitment depends...

In a costly state verification model under commitment the principal may acquire a costly public and imperfectly revealing signal before or after contracting. If the project remains profitable after all signal realisations, optimally the signal is collected, if at all, after contracting, and it...

We explore the strategic value of quantity forcing contracts in a competing manufacturer-retailer hierarchies environment under both adverse selection and moral hazard. Manufacturers dealing with (exclusive) competing retailers may prefer to leave contracts silent on retail prices, whenever...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. To test these predictions, we construct a new international data set on private credit bureaus and public credit registers. We find...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

Two players are involved in a joint project during which a decision must be reached. Each player has private information about future profits. Authority gives one player the right to decide first in a pre-defined set of alternatives. In this framework, I show that (partial) authority should be...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability...

In this paper we analyse the equilibrium degree of commitment in monetary policy to an independent central banker whose preferences are imperfectly observed by private agents. We characterize the incentive compatible strategies by a central bank in office for two periods with no restrictions on...