I use microdata from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to study whether the cost of acquiring health information is an important determinant of the decision to buy private hospital health insurance for individuals aged 50+, in eight European countries. I first test whether,...

In a costly state verification model under commitment the principal may acquire a costly public and imperfectly revealing signal before or after contracting. If the project remains profitable after all signal realisations, optimally the signal is collected, if at all, after contracting, and it...

We provide new empirical evidence concerning the contentious debate over the use of historical cost (HCA) versus mark-to-market (MTM) accounting in regulating financial institutions. These accounting rules, through their interactions with capital regulations, alter financial institutions’...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

In most economies, a fair allocation does not exist. Thus, it seems that we are condemned to live in an unfair world, since we are not happy with what we have and we look at the others with envious eyes. In this paper we want to give an hope for a more equitable society.

The paper proposes a notion of fairness which overcomes the conflict arising between efficiency and the absence of envy in economies with uncertainty and asymmetrically informed agents. We do it in general economies which include, as particular cases, the main differential information economies...

This paper studies the notion of fairness in pure exchange economies involving uncertainty and asymmetric information. We propose a new concept of coalitional fair allocation in order to solve the tension that may exist between efficiency and envy-freeness when the equity of allocations is...

The paper analyses how information acquisition and transmission issues affect the determination of the optimal access pro.t-sharing plan in regulated network industries. It considers a regulated upstream monopoly with cost uncertainty and a downstream unregulated duopoly. It will be shown that,...

Information sharing about borrowers' characteristics and their indebtedness can have important effects on credit markets activity. First, it improves the banks' knowledge of applicants' characteristics and permits a more accurate prediction of their repayment probabilities. Second, it reduces...

This paper compares the optimal investor repayment contracts of a firm which has private information over its expost revenues when the finance can be provided by a single or by two investors (say a big shareholder and a group of small dispersed shareholders). Costly monitoring can be carried out...