Recent empirical findings have emphasized post entry growth of survivors, as opposed to exit of inefficient and small firms, as the main source of growth over time in the average size of a cohort of entering firms. One proposed explanation for the post entry growth of survivors is financing...

We study how a continuum of agents learn about disseminated information in a dynamic beauty contest model when they do not observe aggregate variables, such as prices or quantities, but randomly observe each other's actions. We solve for the market equilibrium and find that the average learning...

This paper suggests a solution to the puzzling finding documented in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen (2002) that the return to an index of private equity is equal to the return to the CRSP index of public equity even though investment in private firms is substantially riskier. It presents an...

This paper develops and structurally estimates a learning model in which firms acquire information about workers' ability by observing their performance over time. A firm consists of a collection of jobs which differ in the informational content of performance, as measured by the dispersion in...

This paper investigates a learning model in which information about a worker's ability, unobserved to both the worker and the firm, can be acquired in any period by both parties by observing the worker's performance at a given task. Tasks are differentially informative about productivity: more...

The organization of workers at an establishment into a trade union is a dynamic process. Establishments that have recently been unionized are relatively likely to switch back into nonunion status, compared with long-unionized establishments. This paper develops a model of learning by workers...

This paper studies the following problem. An agent takes actions based on a possibly misspecified model. The agent is 'large', in the sense that his actions influence the model he is trying to learn about. The agent is aware of potential model misspecification and tries to detect it, in...

We study adoption of a costly new technology when the profitability of the new technique differs over individuals and there is uncertainty about these individual-specific differences. We establish that such individual-specific uncertainty results in a financing constraint when debt contracts are...