This paper examines the book building mechanism for marketing initial public offerings. We present a model where the underwriter selects a group of investors along with a pricing and allocation mechanism in a way that maximizes the information generated during the process of going public at a...

Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...

We evaluate the role of insider ownership in shaping banks’ equity issuances in response to the global financial crisis. We construct a unique dataset on the ownership structure of U.S. banks and their equity issuances and discover that greater insider ownership leads to less equity issuances....

We use a new firm-level dataset to examine the efficiency of investment in emerging economies. In the three-year period following stock market liberalizations, the growth rate of the typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by an average of 5.4 percentage points....

A questionnaire survey of investors in initial public offerings (IPO's) was undertaken to learn about patterns of investor behavior that might be relevant to theories of their underpricing. Respondents were asked for their perception of the allocation process, their concern with stockbroker or...

A central result in the theory of adverse selection in asset markets is that informed sellers can signal quality and obtain higher prices by delaying trade. This paper provides some of the first evidence of a signaling mechanism through trade delays using the residential mortgage market as a...

We examine how a social stigma of seeking information can inhibit learning. Consider a Seeker of uncertain ability who can learn about a task from an Advisor. If higher-ability Seekers need information less, then a Seeker concerned about reputation may refrain from asking to avoid signaling low...

Economists argue that rich information environments and formal enforcement of contracts are necessary to prevent market failures when information asymmetries exist. We test for the necessity of formal enforcement to overcome the problems of asymmetric information by estimating the value of...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

We incorporate a search-theoretic model of imperfect competition into an otherwise standard model of asymmetric information with unrestricted contracts. We develop a methodology that allows for a sharp analytical characterization of the unique equilibrium, and then use this characterization to...