There is a general consensus that the root cause of the most recent turmoil in the domestic and global markets is due to a failure in our regulatory system. Yet, Congress has not supported comprehensive regulation related to the day-to-day activities of mortgage brokers and their relationship...

In recent years the academic world has experienced a mushrooming of journals that falsely pretend to be legitimate academic outlets. We study this phenomenon using information from 46,000 researchers seeking promotion in Italian academia. About 5% of them have published in journals included in...

Seeking to explain why college tuitions are so rapidly increasing, and finding nothing compelling in the usually-offered stories, the author stumbles upon the answer in plain sight. Because of the kind of product higher education is (a credence good) sellers must go to heroic lengths to keep up...

We study the value of information in financial markets by asking whether having more information always leads to higher returns. We address this question in an experiment where single traders have different information levels about an asset’s intrinsic value. In our treatments we vary the...

This paper proposes and tests a model of firm valuation under incompleteinformation that explains the ambiguous relation between idiosyncratic volatilityand stock returns. Specifically, we show that, when investors have incompleteinformation, expected returns as measured by an econometrician...

During the last years issues of strategic management accounting have received widespread attention in the accounting literature. Yet the conceptual foundation of most proposals is not clear. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of one of the most prominent approaches of strategic...

Candidates compete to persuade a decision maker. The decision maker wishes toselect a candidate who possesses a certain ability. Then, as a signaling, each candidatedecides whether to perform a task whose performance statistically re‡ects the ability.However, since the cost of the performance...

An apology is a strong and cheap device to restore social or economic relationships thathave been disturbed. In a laboratory experiment we find that harmdoers use apologies inparticular if they fear punishment and when their intentions cannot be easily inferred. Afteroffenses with ambiguous...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of uninformed buyers and a finite number of sellers, some of them informed. When there is only one seller, full information revelation never...

Information failures are a major barrier to formal financial saving in low income countries. Households in rural communities often lack the information necessary to set up formal deposit accounts or are uncertain about the returns to saving formally. In this paper, we explore the extent to which...