One of the most striking results in experimental economics is the ease with which market bubbles form in a laboratory setting and the difficulty of preventing them. This article re-examines bubble experiments in light of the results of an earlier series of market experiments that examine how...

The consequences of many policies are complicated and difficult to foresee. Those who are capable of providing information to policy makers often have a vested interest in the outcomes. This gives them an incentive to distort information to manipulate policy decisions. In this article we argue...

In the Mexican Peso crisis 1994/95, the lack of readily available information, particularly regarding monetary aggregates, has often been commented on. This paper analyzes empirically whether information disparity with respect to economic fundamentals contributed to the crisis. Using historical...

Researchers who have examined markets populated by "robot traders" have claimed that the high level of allocative efficiency observed in experimental markets is driven largely by the "intelligence" implicit in the rules of the market. Furthermore, they view the ability of agents (artificial or...

Financial markets are to a very large extent influenced by the advent of information. Such disclosures, however, do not only contain information about fundamentals underlying the markets, but they also serve as a focal point for the beliefs of market participants. This dual role of information...

If entrepreneurs have private information about factors influencing the outcome of an investment, individual lending is inefficient. The literature emphasizes improvements through non-market organizations that harness local information through peer monitoring. I investigate the complementary...

Ever since Adam Smith, share contracts have been condemned for their lack of incentives. Sharecropping tenants face incentives to undersupply productive inputs since they receive only a fraction of the marginal revenue. The empirical literature reports that lands under sharecropping are less...

This essay summarizes some recent empirical contributions on two aspects of sharecropping: (i) the effects of the contractual form (incentive power and contract length) on resource allocation and farm performance; and (ii) the exogenous elements behind the choice of different contractual forms.

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

This paper argues that advertising should be regarded as a transaction between a consumer and a firm that potentially generates a mutual benefit. We develop that there exists a problem of adverse selection, however, which makes it impossible to establish direct markets for advertising. The media...