Better informed consumers may be treated preferentially by firms since their consumption serves as a quality signal for other customers. For normal goods this results in wealthy individuals being treated better than poor individuals. We investigate this phenomenon in an equilibrium model of...

This paper is a study of the shape and structure of the distribution of prices at which an identical good is sold in a given market and time period. We find that the typical price distribution is symmetric and leptokurtic, with a standard deviation between 19% and 36%. Only 10% of the variance...

Classical theory of international trade has long advocated trade liberalization and open borders. However, this process is not necessarily beneficial to all countries involved. This paper focuses on two modeled economies that initially share the same technology and per-capita income, but differ...

This paper presents a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made between initial listing and sale agreement. We establish a number of stylized facts pertaining to the...

We develop an empirical methodology to study markets for services. These markets are typically organized as multi-attribute auctions in which buyers take into account seller's price as well as various characteristics, including quality. Our identification and estimation strategies exploit...

We consider a repeated duopoly game where each firm privately chooses its investment in quality, and realized quality is a noisy indicator of the firm’s investment. We focus on dynamic reputation equilibria, whereby consumers ‘discipline’ a firm by switching to its rival in the case that...

We examine markets in which agents make investments and then match into pairs, creating surpluses that depend on their investments and that can be split between the matched agents. In general, each of the matched agents would ”own" part of the surplus in the absence of interagent transfers....

We study students' dropout behavior and its consequences in a dynamic signaling model. Workers pay an education cost per unit of time and cannot commit to a fixed education length. Workers face an exogenous dropout risk before graduation. Since low-productivity students' cost is high, pooling...

This paper demonstrates that a misspecified model of information processing interferes with long-run learning and offers an explanation for why individuals may continue to choose an inefficient action, despite sufficient public information to learn the true state. I consider a social learning...

We develop a theoretical framework to quantitatively assess the general equilibrium effects and welfare implications of central bank reputation and transparency. Monetary policy alternates between periods of active inflation stabilization and periods during which the emphasis on inflation...