In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layouts than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

We investigate and test hypotheses on how informed trading varies with market-wide factors and the structural and trading characteristics of a firm. We find strong evidence of commonality in informed trading, and a systematic dependence of informed trading on firm characteristics that is largely...

This paper examines the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), a legal framework intended to increase transparency and accountability of listed companies, on the cost of going public in the US. We expect SOX to increase the direct cost of going public, but decrease the underpricing because of...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

The Agricultural and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University develops and maintains data to simulate 94 representative crop, dairy, and livestock operations in major production areas in 30 states. The chief purpose of this analysis is to project the economic viability of those farms by...

This paper prices the risk of climate change by calculating a lower bound for the price of a virtual insurance policy against climate risks associated with the business as usual (BAU) emissions path. In analogy with ordinary insurance pricing, this price depends on the current risk to which...

We consider the case in which the opening up of an economy to migration results in departure of skilled workers. We point out that while the possibility of migration changes the set of employment opportunities, it also affects the structure of incentives: Higher returns to skills in the foreign...