Published in the <I>Journal of Reviews on Global Economics</I> (2013). Volume 2, pages 307-329.<P> Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents....</p></i>

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

We study an insurance model characterized by a continuum of risk types, private information and a competitive supply side. We use the model to investigate the welfare effects of discrimination (also known as risk selection). We postulate that a test is available that determines whether an...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the 'Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization' (2007). Volume 62, pages 579-590.<P> When hiring an adviser (he), a policy maker (she) often faces the problem that she has incomplete information about his preferences. Some advisers are good, in...</p>

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

We analyze earnings forecasts retrieved from the I/B/E/S database concerning 596 firms for the sample 1995 to 2011, with a specific focus on whether these earnings forecasts can be predicted from available data. Our main result is that earnings forecasts can be predicted quite accurately using...

In this paper, we test empirically whether there is a relationship between corporate income taxes and CEO bonus payments. Using Compustat and ExecuComp data from 1992 to 2010, we find mixed results. Looking at the whole sample, the average bonus contract rewards tax savings excessively in...

An analysis of about 300000 earnings forecasts, created by 18000 individual forecasters for earnings of over 300 S&P listed firms, shows that these forecasts are predictable to a large extent using a statistical model that includes publicly available information. When we focus on the...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...