This paper empirically assesses the relationship between culture and a free press. The results reveal that a privatized or ‘free media' strongly influences informal institutions of a country or what is commonly known as culture. By providing unbiased and a wide variety information to the...

There is substantial evidence that generalized trust improves economic outcomes at both the individual and aggregate levels. Furthermore, certain institutions such as educational and religious institutions foster trust, trade, and economic growth. A specific mechanism through which trust might...

This paper generalizes a conceptual insight in dynamic contracting with quasilinear payoffs: the principal does not need to pay any information rents for extracting the agent's 'new' private information obtained after signing the contract. This is shown in a general model in which the agent's...

Although it is generally accepted that consumer confidence measures are informative signals about the state of the economy, theoretical macroeconomic models designed for the analysis of monetary policy typically do not provide a role for them. I develop a framework with asymmetric information in...

We suggest a test for discovering whether a potential expert is informed of the distribution of a stochastic process. In a non-Bayesian non-parametric setting, the expert is asked to make a prediction which is tested against a single realization of the stochastic process. It is shown that by...

We develop a model of consulting (advising) where the role of the consultant is that she can reveal signals to her client which refine the client’s original private estimate of the profitability of a project. Importantly, only the client can observe or evaluate these signals, the consultant...

Consider an agent (manager, artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, short runʺ), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...

We study the steady state of a market with incoming cohorts of buyers and sellers who are matched pairwise and bargain under private information. We first consider generalized random-proposer take-it-or-leave-it offer games (GRP TIOLI games). This class of games includes a simple random-proposer...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...