We study the role of brokers in selection markets. We find broker-clients in the Canadian mortgage market are observationally different from branch-clients. They finance larger loans with more leverage and longer amortization. We build and estimate a model of mortgage demand to disentangle three...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. Those series evolved through many iterations. This essay reconstructs the series from 1895 to 1935 and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...

This paper shows the endogeneity of amenities plays a crucial role in determining the welfare distribution of a city's residents. We quantify this mechanism by building a dynamic model of residential choice with heterogeneous households, where consumption amenities are the equilibrium outcome of...

The folk wisdom is that competition reduces agency costs. We provide indirect empirical support for this view. We argue that the temptation to retain cash and engage in less productive activities is more severe for firms in less competitive industries. Hence an unanticipated increase in...

We explore the effects of two kinds of competition on the cost of capital in the tax-exempt bond market: (1) competition amongst underwriters and (2) competition amongst issuers (most of which are quasi-public special authorities sanctioned by state governments). The first kind of...

Open borders imply systems competition. This paper studies the implications of systems competition for the national competition rules. It is shown that an equilibrium where all countries retain their antitrust laws does not exist, since abolishing this law makes it possible for a single country...

This paper studies the impact of technological change and regulatory competition on governmental efforts to generate rents for banks in two stylized regulatory environments. In the first environment, incentive-conflicted regulators attempt to create rents by restricting the size and scope of...