This dissertation includes three essays that consider the role of quality variation within agricultural production when consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences for quality. The first essay, 'The Welfare Benefits of USDA Beef Quality Certification Programs,' estimates the consumer...

We examine insurance markets with two types of customers: those who regret suboptimal decisions and those who don.t. In this setting, we characterize the equilibria under hidden information about the type of customers and hidden action. We show that both pooling and separating equilibria can...

This article examines the railway concessions in France in the 19th century as examples of a principal-agent relationship between the State and a contractor. I show that one of the main assumptions of the agency theory, the asymmetric information at the benefit of the agent, is not verified. I...

This paper examines, for a two-period signalling game played by a revenue-raising government and a monopolistic firm in an asymmetric information context, how the government behaves when it taxes the firm’s production. Information regarding the firm’s efficiency (or its potential to pay...

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that...

This paper investigates the interaction between consumers and producers in designing incentive mechanism for climate protection. Firms have material interests in building a moral reputation for those consumers who prefer buying from socially responsible firms. We examine optimal monetary...

This paper provides an explanation for the empirically proven relationship between overtime and future benefits. We suggest an internal signaling model, in which a worker signals his value to the employer by supplying unpaid overtime. In our empirical analysis, we examine whether overtime has in...

Motivated by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 several papers have provided explanations for why liquidity may dry up during market stress. This paper also looks at this issue but focuses on the question as to why the liquidity crunch was not uniform across maturities. As funding pressures were...

Although credit rationing has been a stylized fact since the groundbreaking papers by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981, hereinafter S-W) and Besanko and Thakor (1987a, hereinafter B-T), Arnold and Riley (2009) note that credit rationing is unlikely in the S-W model, and Clemenz (1993) shows that it does...

This paper examines the conditions for credit volume or borrower rationing in a competitive credit market in which the project characteristics are private information of the borrowers. There can only be credit volume rationing if the higher-risk credit applicants have a higher return in the...