Brazil's 2005 bankruptcy law reform strengthened creditor protection, resulting in a substantial acceleration of credit expansion and business investment growth. In this paper, we go beyond average effects and examine to what extent the pro-creditor reform affected the allocation of resources...

This paper reports on experiments testing the viability of markets for cheap talk information. We find that the poor quality of the information transmitted leads to a collapse of information markets. The reasons for this are surprising given the previous experimental results on cheap-talk games....

We examine the ability of policymakers to stimulate household borrowing and spending during the Great Recession by reducing banks' cost of funds. Using panel data on 8.5 million U.S. credit card accounts and 743 credit limit regression discontinuities, we estimate the marginal propensity to...

We show that limited dealer participation in the market, coupled with an informational friction resulting from high frequency trading, can induce demand for liquidity to be upward sloping and strategic complementarities in traders' liquidity consumption decisions: traders demand more liquidity...

We examine whether the desire for more information is people's dominant motive for reading economic and political news. Drawing on representative samples of the U.S. population with more than 15,000 respondents in total, we measure and experimentally vary people's beliefs about the...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

In this paper we build a formal model to study market environments where information is costly to acquire and is of use also to potential competitors. In such situations a market for information may form, where reports - of unverifiable quality - over the information acquired are sold. A...

We propose that multinational firms learn about their profitability in a particular market by observing their performance in nearby markets. We first develop a model of firm expectations formation with noisy signals from multiple markets and derive predictions on expectations formation and...