We analyze the information content of stock recommendations by a sell-side equity analyst when investors are uncertain about the analyst's incentives. In our model, an analyst can either be quot;unbiasedquot;, having incentives that are congruent with those of the investor, or quot;biasedquot;,...

We study the information content of stock reports when investors are uncertain about a financial analyst's incentives. Incentives may be aligned, in which case the analyst wishes to credibly convey information, or incentives may be misaligned. We find the following: Any investor uncertainty...

Intro -- Contents -- I. Introduction -- II. Related Literature -- III. Model -- IV. Optimal Search and Hiring -- V. Performance Metrics -- VI. Policy Implications -- VII. Conclusions -- Appendix: Proofs of Lemmas, Propositions and Implications -- References.

Why would the US threaten punitive tariffs on luxury autos to implement a market share target in auto parts? We show that by making threats to a linked market, a market share may be implemented with fairly weak informa- tional and administrative requirements. Moreover, such policies can be both...

Does the polarization in the US lead to dysfunctional behavior? To study this question, we investigate the attitudes of supporters of Donald Trump and of Hillary Clinton towards each other and how these attitudes affect spiteful behavior. We find that both Trump and Clinton supporters have less...

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest...

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....

Why do individuals participate in charitable gambling and state-run lotteries? In contrast to previous explanations that rely on risk-preference or pure love of gambling motives, we present a model where risk-neutral expected utility maximizers explicitly recognize that lotteries are being used...