Prior research on "strategic voting" has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

California was the first state to implement smoke-free restaurant and bar laws, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. We analyze how these laws affected the distribution of revenues between bars and restaurants. Critics of smoke-free bar laws have often claimed that a prohibition on smoking reduces...

The paper seeks to characterize what information is always available for contracting, independent of the form of the contract and the probabilities of different states of nature. The paper denotes such information as contractible. It is established that it is possible to speak uniquely of...

A common feature of financial intermediaries is that the welfare of one borrower is adversely affected by the poor performance of other borrowers. That is, there exists a degree of joint liability among the borrowers of a financial intermediary. This paper provides an explanation for this...

Corruption among court officials varies widely across countries and exhibits considerable intertemporal persistence. I present a model of court corruption in which there are multiple equilibria, differentiated by corruption levels. In the model, courts provide incentives for individuals to...

Market prices are thought to contain a lot of useful information. Hence, government regulators (and other economic agents) are often urged to use market prices to guide decisions. An important issue to consider is the endogeneity of market prices and how they are affected by the prospect of...

about market betas.

Prior research on “strategic voting” has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

We study trade between an informed seller and an uninformed buyer who have existing inventories of assets similar to those being traded. We show that these inventories could induce the buyer to increase the price (a run-up) but could also make trade impossible (a freeze) and hamper information...