Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

We investigate how international patent activity enables firms from emerging economies to thrive in the global marketplace. We match Chinese customs data to US patent records, and leverage the quasi-random assignment of USPTO patent examiners to identify the causal effect of a US patent grant on...

Compared with the traditional public-finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner, earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal-agent setting is considered, where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament. We...

This paper models privatization as a cooperative game between the government, a trade union and the private shareholders. These players kno w that privatization increases the efficiency of a firm, but only the management of the firm knows the exact value of the relevant productivity-increasing...

We show that competing firms relax overall competition by lowering future barriers to entry. We illustrate our findings in a two-period model with adverse selection where banks strategically commit to disclose borrower information. By doing this, they invite rivals to enter their market....

This paper develops a theoretical explanation why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local governments which differ in the cost of providing public goods....

We investigate experimentally how the menstrual cycle affects bargaining behavior and bargaining outcomes of women. Female participants negotiate in an unstructured bilateral bargaining game with asymmetric information about the allocation of a surplus ('pie size'). We find that the menstrual...

Basu and Van (1998) show that a ban on child labour may be self-enforcing under the extreme assumption that, above the subsistence level, no amount of consumption can compensate parents for the disutility of child labour. We show that a partial ban may be self-enforcing also in a more general...

The traditional approach to flexible retirement (e.g. NDC) neglects the impact of asymmetric information on actuarial fairness (neutrality). The mechanism design approach (e.g. Diamond, 2003) gives up the requirement of neutrality and looks for a redistributive second-best benefit-retirement-age...

Non-linear income taxes and linear commodity taxes are analysed when people differ with respect to ability, high-skilled agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neither individual abilities nor preferences are observable. The paper highlights how informational constraints may motivate...