This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence of the ability of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I...

This paper exploits a novel hand-collected dataset to provide a comprehensive analysis of the social relationships that underlie illegal insider trading networks. I find that inside information flows through strong social ties based on family, friends, and geographic proximity. On average,...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

We demonstrate how endogenous information acquisition in venture capital markets creates investment cycles when competing financiers undertake their screening decisions in an uncoordinated way, thereby highlighting the role of intertemporal screening externalities induced by competition among...

In this paper we empirically examine a hybrid New-Keynesian model with heterogeneous bounded rational agents who may adopt an optimistic or pessimistic attitude - so called animal spirits - towards future movements of the output and inflation gap. The model is estimated via the simulated method...

Macroeconomic and sector-specific shocks exert differential effects on investment in disaggregate sectoral data. The response to macroeconomic shocks is hump-shaped, just as in aggregate data. The effects of sectoral innovations decrease monotonically. A calibrated model of investment with...

Countercyclical dispersion of firm outcomes (micro dispersion) is commonly used as a proxy for micro uncertainty. In this paper, we characterize conditions under which micro dispersion and micro uncertainty co-move positively in the context of a large Cournot economy with dispersed information...

Real exchange rates are highly volatile and persistent. I provide a novel structural explanation for these facts using a model with dispersed information among firms. When producers face strategic complementarities in price-setting, uncertainty about competitors' beliefs results in sluggish...

In a simple continuous-time model where the learning process affects the willingness to hold liquidity, we provide an intuitive explanation of business cycle asymmetry and post-crisis slow recovery. When observing a liquidity shock, individuals rationally increase their subjective probability of...

Social interactions determine many economic behaviors, but information on social ties does not exist in most publicly available and widely used datasets. We present results on the identification of social networks from observational panel data that contains no information on social ties between...