Firms in many industries may obtain superior knowledge of customer preferences, whereas customers often need costly efforts to learn their match values. In this pa-per, we examine the optimal pricing strategies for a firm with superior knowledge, when customers can reduce information asymmetry...

The online appendices provide supplementary results and discussion, the development and regulatory status of cryptocurrency exchanges, a theoretical model of wash trading, and a further explanation of Benford’s law as a forensic tool.Full paper available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3530220

We analyze how the product market competition shock due to China’s WTO entry affects local US banks heterogeneously. Using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we document that in regions with greater exposure to the shock, loan quality deteriorates and bank profitability declines...

We find that the weather induced local employment growth surprises are positively related to the cross section of future local stock returns for up to three months without subsequent reversals. In comparison, neither weather nor reported employment growth can predict future returns. This return...

Information Technology (IT) such as blockchains, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and Internet of Things (IoT) allow firms and consumers to trace the physical flow of products along a supply chain. Although this improvement in information transparency helps enhance product safety and...

We investigate the (sell-side) analyst rankings of <italic>Institutional Investor</italic> (I/I) and <italic>The Wall Street Journal</italic> (WSJ), using data from 1993–2005. We find that factors with a primary component of recognition are the most important determinants of the rankings, although performance measures are...

This paper examines the motivation and impact of corporate diversification in Chinese listed firms. We find that in local government owned-firms there is a non-linear relationship between the level of firm diversification and state ownership. As state ownership increases from zero, the level of...

This paper documents a hallmark feature of China’s state capitalism as the state controlling the economy in a vertical structure: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) monopolize key industries in the upstream, whereas the downstream industries are largely open to private competition. We develop...