In recent years, financial institutions especially universal/commercial banks across Africa have been faced with forceful mergers and acquisitions. These occurrences impede the level of financial inclusion and reduces public confidence in the financial system as a whole. This study assessed the...

Despite a growing interest, researchers and practitioners still struggle to transfer the blockchain concept introduced by Bitcoin to market-oriented application scenarios. To shed light on the technology's usage in markets with asymmetric information, this study analyzes the effect of the...

We experimentally analyze a lemons market with a labor-market framing. Sellers are referred to as “workers” and have the possibility to provide “employers” with costly but credible information about their “productivity”. Economic theory suggests that in this setup, unraveling takes...

This paper characterizes the optimal information structure in competitive insurance markets with adverse selection. A regulator assigns ratings to individuals according to their risk characteristics, insurers offer fixed insurance contracts to each rating group, and the market clears as in...

This paper shows that the possibility of collusion between an agent and a supervisor imposes no restrictions on the set of implementable social choice functions (SCF) and associated payoff vectors. Any SCF and any payoff profile that are implementable if the supervisor's information was public...

We build a general equilibrium model with financial frictions that impede the effectiveness of monetary policy in stimulating output. Agents with heterogeneous productivity can increase investment by levering up, but this increases interim liquidity risk. In equilibrium, the more productive...

This paper uses the Austrian Social Security Register (ASSD) to explore what information firms infer from the three common types of displacement: individual layoffs, individuals displaced due to a closure and individuals displaced due to a mass layoff. I bring together two strands of the...

Syrian agriculture faces new opportunities in a liberalized trading world. The European Union has been one of the most important new markets for the Syrian citrus output but trading among the neighbors has to expand in the future, specially, with the countries of (GAFTA) region and eastern...

Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the origins of the Sicilian mafia have remained a largely unresolved mystery. Both institutional and historical explanations have been proposed in the literature through the years. In this paper, we develop an argument for a market...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...