This paper develops and tests hypotheses regarding the relationship between D&O insurance purchase and firm size, governance characteristics, and business risk, using a unique panel dataset on Canadian firms for years 1996-2005. The rich data permit examination of the determinants of insurance...

Any investor faces important risk when investing in a public firm; risk is even more pronounce when investing in new public firms since relatively little is known at the time of the initial public offering. The information asymmetry problem is partially mitigated through the underpricing of the...

Some labor markets have recently developed formal signalling mechanisms, e.g. the signalling for interviews in the job market for new Ph.D. economists. We evaluate the effect of such mechanisms on two-sided matching markets by considering a game of incomplete information between firms and...

This paper discusses the strategic role of mismatching, where players voluntarily form inefficient teams or forego the formation of efficient teams, respectively. Strategic mismatching can be rational when players realize a competitive advantage (e.g. harming other competitors). In addition, the...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

Economic theory suggests that occupational licensing can be a barrier to entry that restricts labor supply (Friedman, 1962; Stigler, 1971) or a signal of quality that enhances the labor market (Leland, 1979). This paper studies two types of licenses for one occupation – dental assistant (DA) –...

II address the way agency incentives evolve, from listed equity with low liquidity to highly liquid stocks with active informed speculators. I conclude that, as the informativeness of stock price about the manager's actions improves, less weight needs to be given to both equity and non-price...

We analyze the impact of records of denied and withdrawn customer complaints on job separation in a dataset based on FINRA's Broker-Check database with more than 1 mio. financial advisers. Compared to misconduct that actually leads to a conviction of the adviser, denied and withdrawn complaints...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

This paper suggests that institutional factors which reward social networks at the expenses of productivity can play an important role in explaining brain drain. The effects of social networks on brain drain are analyzed in a decision theory framework with asymmetric information. We distinguish...