The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is...

We provide a new explanation to the limited stock market participation puzzle. In deciding whether to buy stocks, investors factor in the risk of being cheated. The perception of this risk is a function not only of the objective characteristics of the stock, but also of the subjective...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

International knowledge spillovers, especially through multinational companies (MNCs), have recently been a major topic of the academic and management discussion. However, most studies treat MNC subsidiaries as relatively passive actors without clear knowledge protection strategies. The goal of...

This paper analyses the relation between authority and incentives. It extends the standard principal / agent model by a project selection stage in which the principal can either delegate the choice of project to the agent or keep the authority. The agent's subsequent choice of e ort depends both...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

The standard economic treatment of knowledge mixes a mentalist approach in game theory and an externalist approach in growth theory and related fields. This confusing state requires a philosophical clarification. I propose to start out from F.A von Hayek’s approach developed in his book on...

The systems of innovation (SI) approach has been established and extended during the last two decades. Although elementary goals and progress have been reached through seminal contributions by Freeman (1987), Lundvall (1992) or Nelson (1993), in designing a generic approach, displaying the...

In this paper we challenge basic results of signaling models. In our banking model each project of a borrower is described by a continuous density of outcomes. Different density functions are classified according to second stochastisch dominance. Combining these features we find that in a...

In this paper we study the impact of more transparency in the foreign exchange market on the ex ante expected volume of international trade. Transparency is measured by the informational content of publicly observed signals correlated to the random exchange rate. We find that more transparency...