This paper develops a model of rational bubbles where trade of an asset takes place through a chain of middlemen. We show that there exists a unique and robust equilibrium, and a bubble can occur due to information frictions in bilateral and decentralized markets. Under reasonable assumptions,...

We study firms' incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining asymmetric business cycles. When the economy has been in a boom in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with an optimistic belief,...

This paper examines how monetary expansion causes asset bubbles. When there is no monetary expansion, a bubbly asset is not created due to a hold-up problem. Monetary expansion increases buyers' money holdings, and then, dealers are willing to buy a worthless asset from sellers, in hopes of...

We construct a model of bubbles where an asset can be used as collateral primarily due to higher-order uncertainty: while both a lender and a borrower know that the intrinsic value of the asset is low, they may still believe that a "greater fool" exists who will purchase it at a much higher...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

We investigate the connection between corporate governance system configurations and the role of intermediaries in the respective systems from a informational perspective. Building on the economics of information we show that it is meaningful to distinguish between internalisation and...

To address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the example of minimum wages. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms set prices and wages, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. We find that the majority of consumers...

Although it is generally accepted that consumer confidence measures are informative signals about the state of the economy, theoretical macroeconomic models designed for the analysis of monetary policy typically do not provide a role for them. I develop a framework with asymmetric information in...