This paper looks at the incentives to free-ride on the information signaling of others and shows how this can lead to delay in productive activity and to a cascade of activity once information is signaled. In the presence of increasing returns to scale to a profitable project, an initial pioneer...

Chapter 11 structures complex negotiations between creditors and debtors that are overseen by a bankruptcy court. This paper identifies conditions under which it is optimal for the court to sometimes err in determining whether a firm should be liquidated. Such errors can affect the optimal...

We develop a spatial model in which we endogenize both the pricing of ATM services by banks and the choice of home bank and ATM use by consumers. The equilibrium delivers the empirical regularities: Banks set high bank account fees for their own customers, but do not charge them for ATM usage; in...

We develop a spatial model in which we endogenize both the pricing of ATM services by banks and the choice of home bank and ATM use by consumers. The equilibrium delivers the empirical regularities: Banks set high bank account fees for their own customers, but do not charge them for ATM usage; in...

This paper considers a financier contemplating a venture capital investment in a firm whose true value is unknown. The financier must make information-gathering and investment decisions on an ongoing basis to decide whether to undertake the investment and, later, if he chooses to finance the...

We argue that competition between dealers in a classic dealer market is intertemporal: A trader identifies a particular dealer and negotiates a final price with only the intertemporal threat to switch dealers imposing pricing discipline on the dealer. In this kind of market structure, we show...

On the NYSE and exchanges that feature open limit order books, larger orders receive worse prices. Accordingly, market microstructure theory has focused on developing consistent models. However, on exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and FX markets, larger orders receive better...

A standard presumption of market microstructure models is that competition between risk-neutral market makers inevitably leads to price schedules that leave market makers zero expected profits conditional on the order flow. This paper documents an important lack of robustness of this zero-profit...