Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection.This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. Dynamicauction theory with private value highlights more aggressive bidding by uninformedbidders and higher prices when an informed participant...

Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004) suggest an adverse selection role of corporate cashreserve. Specifically, if investors know a bidder does not have to issue to invest, an attempt to doso sends a strong pessimistic signal of overvaluation. Despite its intuitiveness, this notion has notbeen...

We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studying a credit market where the qualities of investment projects are not observable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible. Standard banks can alleviate moral-hazard problems by securing a portion of a...

We show that firms intermediating trade have incentives to overinvest in financial expertise, and that these investments can be destabilizing. Financial expertise in our model improves firms' ability to accurately estimate value when trading a security. It creates adverse selection, which under...