Any investor faces important risk when investing in a public firm; risk is even more pronounce when investing in new public firms since relatively little is known at the time of the initial public offering. The information asymmetry problem is partially mitigated through the underpricing of the...

This paper develops and tests hypotheses regarding the relationship between D&O insurance purchase and firm size, governance characteristics, and business risk, using a unique panel dataset on Canadian firms for years 1996-2005. The rich data permit examination of the determinants of insurance...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

We develop a model wherein a risk-neutral but ambiguity-averse principal contracts with a risk-averse agent who has a risky project. Both the agent and the principal can observe the project output and a public signal. The correlation between the output and the public signal is private...

This paper describes an organizational setting in which professional employees are required to work inefficiently long hours. The focus of our investigation is large law firms. The income sharing that characterizes legal partnerships creates incentives to promote associates who have a propensity...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

We investigate the properties of health insurance demand in Burkina Faso, where we offered poor households a voluntary health insurance product at half the usual price. The targeting procedure we implemented delivers a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, which identifies the price elasticity...

This article examines the impact of varying mandatory pensions on saving, life insurance, and annuity markets in an adverse selection economy. Under reasonable restrictions, we find unambiguous effects on market size, participation rates, and equilibrium prices. The degree of adverse selection,...

Risk classification refers to the use of observable characteristics by insurers to group individuals with similar expected claims, to compute the corresponding premiums, and thereby to reduce asymmetric information. Permitting risk classification may reduce informational asymmetry-induced...