Automotive manufacturers are known to use deadline-based convex incentives to motivate dealerships to sell new cars. This paper shows that dealerships respond to these incentive targets by pushing customers from used to new cars as the end of the month approaches, and that subprime loans written...

We study the impact of scarcity on intermediary profits through an analysis of the effects of the 2011 Japanese tsunami on the U.S. used car market. The tsunami devastated Japanese new car production for several months, which we show led to a demand surge for used cars. Wholesale and retail...

We study the impact of information disclosure policies on firm performance by exploiting a policy change that provides plausibly exogenous “shocks” to firms’ reputations based on their allocation to coarse performance categories. Medicare grades dialysis firms using three coarse...