By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

We first develop a theory-based metric to judge the popularity of value-weighting in a stock market. We then use our metric to document that although value-weighting is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is increasing almost everywhere. Finally, as we have...

We show that aggregate insider trading (AIT) in the S&P 500 is a reliable predictor of the U.S. equity premium, while AIT outside the S&P 500 seems to be uninformative. Aggregate trading of S&P 500 insiders outperforms a broad set of well-established predictors considering in- and out-of-sample...

We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service "Google Answers". While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...