We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

This paper shows that agent inattention to taxes generates a time-inconsistency problem in the choice of tax policy. In equilibrium, inattention leads to inefficiently high tax rates and a taxation bias emerges. Combining structural and sufficient statistics approaches, we quantify the magnitude...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

We consider a monopolistic certifier selling certification services to a partially privately informed seller. The certifier can enable the seller to disclose her private information publicly, as well as gather additional market information about the good's quality publicly. We show that the...