This paper shows that buyers’ coordination failures might prevent entry in an industry with an incumbent firm and a more efficient potential entrant. If there was a single buyer, or if all buyers formed a central purchasing agency, coordination failures would be avoided and efficient entry...

High-tech start-ups get external finance and guidance mostly from venture capitalists and/or business angels. We identify a simultaneous double moral hazard for the management style of entrepreneurs and the decision to advise the firm for financiers. We embed this relationship into the financial...

We extend the literature on exclusive dealing by allowing the incumbent and the potential entrant to merge. This uncovers new effects. First, exclusive deals can be used to improve the incumbent’s bargaining position in the merger negotiation. Second, the incumbent finds it easier to elicit...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

Many studies show that most people are not financially literate and are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts. However, the evidence on the determinants of economic literacy is scant. This paper uses international panel data on 55 countries, merging indicators of economic...

In this paper we focus on poor financial literacy as one potential factor explaining lack of portfolio diversification. We use the 2007 Unicredit Customers’ Survey, which has indicators of portfolio choice, financial literacy and many demographic characteristics of investors. We first propose...

Rational investors perceive correctly the value of financial information. Investment in information is therefore rewarded with a higher Sharpe ratio. Overconfident investors overstate the quality of their own information, and thus attain a lower Sharpe ratio. We contrast the implications of the...

We provide a detailed account of the portfolio of Italian households and its evolution, using repeated cross-sectional and panel data drawn from the 1989-98 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We offer an in-depth description of the lifetime pattern of asset holdings and their...

Many argue that the primary function of banks is to provide cheap credit, and to this effect advocate strict protection of creditor rights. But banks serve another important function: through project screening, they can improve the allocation of capital across projects. In this paper we show...

We use two data sets, one from a large brokerage and another from a major bank, to ask: (i) whether financial advisors tend to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer, experienced but presumably busy investors; (ii) how advised accounts actually perform relative to...