Disclosure policies have the potential to help consumers and make markets more efficient. Yet, the effectiveness of disclosure policies can be undermined if firms strategically make unfavorable information unnecessarily complicated to understand. To explore the incentives for using complexity in...

This paper investigates whether and how college quality rankings affect a key factor in the ranks measure of quality -- financial resources per student -- for public colleges. We show that when a public college is exogenously included in the U.S. News amp; World Report rankings educational and...

Economists widely agree that, absent sufficient efficiencies or other offsetting factors, mergers that increase concentration substantially are likely to be anticompetitive. Further, holding everything else equal, the magnitude of anticompetitive effects tends to be larger, the larger is the...

Recent outcry for antitrust reform argues that U.S. markets have become more concentrated, that large firms’ profit margins have increased, and that part of these changes may be attributed to lax antitrust enforcement since the 1960s. While each of these arguments is part of an intense...

Using a unique survey of 10,000 Chinese couples in 1991, this paper evaluates the impact of marriage market on life quality after marriage. Specifically, we compare three matchmaking means - self match, parental involvement, and friend introduction - and associate them with the degree of...

Restaurant hygiene scores have become a success story of public disclosure of government inspections. Disclosing hygiene scores has the potential to be a powerful market mechanism that can help consumers make better decisions while also creating incentives for restaurants to improve their...

This paper presents new evidence of asymmetric pass-through, the notion that upward cost shocks are passed through faster than downward cost shocks, in U.S. gasoline prices. Much of the extant literature comes to seemingly contradictory conclusions about the existence of an asymmetry, though the...