A central result in the theory of adverse selection in asset markets is that informed sellers can signal quality by delaying trade. This paper uses the residential mortgage market as a laboratory to test this mechanism. Using detailed, loan-level data on privately securitized mortgages, we find...

We show that competing firms relax overall competition by lowering future barriers to entry. We illustrate our findings in a two-period model with adverse selection where banks strategically commit to disclose borrower information. By doing this, they invite rivals to enter their market....

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...