We study firms' incentives to acquire private information in a setting where subsequent competition leads to firms' later signaling their private information to rivals. Due to signaling, equilibrium prices are distorted, and so while firms benefit from obtaining more precise private information,...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

This paper describes optimal contracts in a dynamic costly state verification model with stochastic monitoring. An agent operates a risky project on behalf of a principal over several periods. Each period, the principal can observe the revenues from the project provided he incurs a fixed cost....

In most countries, the supply of paper money is controlled by a state institution. This paper provides an explanation for why such an arrangement is typically chosen. I use a deterministic matching model with a continuum of agents where enforcement is limited and where some agents produce public...

In this paper I show that a lax anti-counterfeiting policy is inconsistent with price stability. I use a deterministic matching model with no commitment and no enforcement. An intrinsically worthless but perfectly durable object called a ‘note’ can be produced by banks at a given cost, but...

We study the effect of transaction costs (e.g., a trading fee or a transaction tax, like the Tobin tax)on the aggregation of private information in financial markets. We analyze a financial market à la Glosten and Milgrom, in which informed and uninformed traders trade in sequence with a market...

This paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to, subject to a constraint on information flow. When idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions, firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to...

Using data on product-level prices matched to the producing �rm�s unit labor cost, we reject the hypothesis of a full and immediate pass-through of marginal cost. Since we focus on idiosyncratic variation, this does not �t the predictions of the Ma´ckowiak and Wiederholt (2009) version of...

We introduce professional financial advice in households’ choice to hold risky financial assets. Consistent with the predictions from a formal model, we present evidence that households’ trust in financial advice only matters when their perceived own financial capability is low. Instead, for...

In this paper we discuss the role of the cross-sectional heterogeneity of beliefs in the context of understanding and assessing macroeconomic vulnerability. Emphasis lies on the potential of changing levels of disagreement in expectations to influence the propensity of the economy to switch...