This paper examines to what extent reputational concerns give rating agencies incentives to reveal information. It demonstrates that, in a simple model in which a rating agency has public and private information about a project, it may ignore private information and even contradict public...

We propose a theory of supervision with endogenous transaction costs. A principal delegates part of his authority to a supervisor who can acquire soft information about an agent's productivity. If the supervisor were risk-neutral, the principal would simply make the better informed supervisor...

Using a standard monetary policy model, we study how foreign exchange intervention may be used to condition the perception among economic agents of the objective of the policymaker. Foreign exchange intervention does not bring about a systematic policy again, such as an increase in the...

This paper studies how investors react to public messages that may be optimistically biased. We first construct a communication game between an investor and a (possibly) biased securities analyst. We find an equilibrium characterised by the following properties: first, the investor reacts more...

We consider a noisy rational expectations equilibrium in a multi-asset economy populated by informed and uninformed investors, and noise traders. Informed investors privately observe an aggregate risk factor affecting the probabilities of different states of the economy. Uninformed investors...

Focusing on homogeneous beliefs, we can distinguish two commonly shared ideas that, i) the competition between informed traders destroys their trading profits, ii) trading with a noisy signal brings about a loss in the expected profits. So far, it has been proved in the latter framework, that...

Using cross-sectional analysis of corporate dividend policy we show that large shareholders extract rents from firms and expropriate minority shareholders in the weak corporate governance environment of an emerging economy. By comparing dividends paid across varying corporate ownership struc-...

The paper studies credible information transmission by governments. A group of heterogenous individuals have to make private investment and labour supply decisions while relying on the government for information about investment returns. The government consists of an elected citizen who chooses...

Does the distribution of land rights affect the choice of contractible techniques? I present evidence suggesting that Nicaraguan farmers are more likely to grow effort-intensive crops on owned rather than on rented plots. I consider two theoretical arguments that illustrate why property rights...

When fairly homogeneous taxpayers are affected by common income shocks, a tax agency’s optimal auditing strategy consists of auditing a low-income declarer with a probability that (weakly) increases with the other taxpayers’ declarations. Such policy generates a coordination game among...