Consider managers evaluating their employees' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show that...

This paper studies individual truth-telling behavior in the presence of multiple lying opportunities with heterogeneous stake sizes. The results show that individuals lie downwards (i.e. forgo money due to their lie) in low-stakes situations in order to signal honesty, and thereby mitigate the...

Firms constantly face new and more stringent tax disclosure requirements and, increasingly, paying a fair share of tax is seen as part of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we investigate whether mandating qualitative tax disclosure leads to intended outcomes, using, as an exogenous...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. Our theory-driven laboratory experiment investigates this strategic use of vagueness in voluntary disclosure and asks whether there is scope for policy to improve information transmission. We find that vagueness is profitably...

We investigate the effects of a qualitative tax disclosure mandate aimed at improving tax transparency and compliance by imposing reputational costs for firms. We use, as an exogenous shock, the 2016 UK reform that required large businesses to disclose their tax strategy. We find that treated...

This paper studies Anglo-Dutch premium auctions used in the secondary market for financial securities in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, Europe's financial capital at the time. An Anglo-Dutch premium auction consists of an English auction followed by a Dutch auction, with a cash premium paid to...

How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced progovernment...