Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...

Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) show that there need not exist a competitive equilibrium in markets with adverse selection. Building on their framework we demonstrate that externalities between agents − an agent's utility upon accepting a contract depends on the average type attracted by the...

Using a panel of 1122 UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange over the period of 1981 to 2009, endogenous switching regression models (SRM) incorporating a predicted corporate efficiency index are estimated in this paper in an effort to clarify the role of cash flow in examining the impact...

We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. There are two stages. In the first one, workers in the South decide whether to move and...

Credence goods are characterized by informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers that invite fraudulent behavior by sellers. This paper presents the results of a natural field experiment on taxi rides in Athens, Greece, set up to measure different types of fraud and to examine the...

Immigrant workers and their labor force participation in host countries have received critical attention in all concerned disciplines, principally owing to its strong implications for well-being of natives. The ageing population in many rich countries and several related and unrelated issues...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard – the tendency of the supply...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

We analyze the role of damage clauses in labor contracts using a model in which a worker may want to terminate his current employment relationship and work for another firm. We show that the initial parties to a contract have an incentive to stipulate excessive damage clauses, which leads to ex...

The paper constructs an asymmetric information model to investigate the efficiency and equity cases for government mandated benefits. A mandate can improve workers' insurance, and may also redistribute in favour of more "deserving" workers. The risk is that it may also reduce output. The more...