This paper introduces a new high frequency time series of Confederate money prices taken from the newspapers of Richmond and leading cities in the Eastern Confederacy. The new Grayback series is tested for “turning points.” The empirical analysis suggests that “turning points” in the...

Should an informed seller of multiple goods sell the best goods first to make a favorable impression on buyers, or instead hold back on the best goods until buyers have learned more from earlier sales? To help answer this question we consider the sequential auction of two goods by a seller with...

The current literature on sharing contracts emphasizes the importance of asymmetric information and typically assumes that one party is risk neutral while the other is risk averse. This paper describes a real-world contract that is widely used - the movie exhibition contract - and argues that...

We study the role of banking relationships in IPO underwriting using a sample of 484 Japanese IPOs. Among other issues, we consider whether bank relationships lead to increased access to public equity markets, especially for smaller, lesser-known firms. When a firm in Japan goes public, it can...

Previous work on exit in declining industries has neglected mergers. We examine a simple model that predicts which declining industries experience horizontal mergers. Mergers are more likely if 1) market concentration is high; 2) the inverse demand curve is steep at high levels of output and...

People are sometimes risk-averse in gains but risk-loving in losses. Such behavior and other anomalies underlying prospect theory arise from a model of local status maximization in which consumers compare their wealth with other consumers of similar wealth. This social explanation shares key...