We use the tools of mechanism design, combined with the theory of risk measures, to analyze how a cash constrained owner of an asset with known stochastic returns raises capital from a population of investors that differ in their risk aversion and budget constraints. The issuer partitions the...

This paper investigates and quantifies citizens' susceptibility to fake news and assesses, using a randomized control trial, the effectiveness of a policy intervention to raise awareness. We find that the average citizen lacks proficiency in identifying fake news and harbors an inflated...

We survey the recent literature in economics measuring what is on top of people's minds using open-ended questions. We first provide an overview of studies in political economy, macroeconomics, finance, labor economics, and behavioral economics that have employed such measurement. We next...

We study an information design problem with continuous state and discrete signal space. Under convex value functions, the optimal information structure is interval-partitional and exhibits a dual expectations property: each induced signal is the conditional mean (taken under the prior density)...

This paper studies the effect of pre-election polls on the participation decision of citizens in a large, two-candidate election, and the resulting incentives for the poll participants. Citizens have private values and voting is costly and instrumental. The environment is ex ante symmetric and...

This paper analyzes social connectedness as an information channel in bank lending. We move beyond the inefficient lending between peers in exclusive networks by exploiting Facebook data that reflect social ties within the U.S. population. After accounting for physical and cultural distances,...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects early job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance (UI) scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months for...

We study the market interaction between financial intermediaries and retail investors, who not only face uncertainty about the performance of the different investments but also have limited awareness of the available investment opportunities. Intermediaries compete for investors via the menu of...

We study the delegation problem between a principal and an agent, who not only has better information about the performance of the available actions but also has superior awareness of the set of actions that are actually feasible. The agent decides which of the available actions to reveal and...

We provide evidence on the stories that people tell to explain a historically notable rise in inflation using samples of experts, U.S. households, and managers. We document substantial heterogeneity in narratives about the drivers of higher inflation rates. Experts put more emphasis on...