Most firms issue financial assets such as debt or equity (e.g. bonds or stock) to outside investors. While these financial assets differ greatly in their characteristics, their diversity has received little attention in the literature. Filling this important gap in the literature, this paper...

This paper analyses the intraday reaction of the Spanish market to annual earnings announcements. Specifically, we examine the levels of stock liquidity, trading activity, volatility, and asymmetric information, as well as the order placement strategy around earnings disclosures. We also analyse...

Evidence on adverse selection in slave markets remains inconclusive. A necessary prerequisite is that buyers and sellers have different information. We study informational asymmetry on the slave markets through notarial acts on public slave auctions in Mauritius between 1825 and 1835, involving...

Who borrows Micro Credit (MC) is the information needed to improve not only MC programs but also policies of poverty alleviation. This paper analyzes the MC use determinants taking social ties into account using data in Guatemalan Living Standard Measurement Study. It shows that the determinants...

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on...

Exchange between anonymous actors in Internet auctions corresponds to a one-shot prisoner's dilemma-like situation. Therefore, in any given auction the risk is high that seller and buyer will cheat and, as a consequence, that the market will collapse. However, mutual cooperation can be attained...

This paper analyses corporate loan guarantees among the Korean chaebol affiliates. Loan guarantees are found to be efficiency-neutral under a set of ideal conditions characterized by perfect and symmetric information, no agency problem, and no governmental interference in private financial...

We examine the information environments of firms following large, non-recurring charges (“baths”). We test competing hypotheses about the consequences of a bath—a bath either improves the information environment (the transparency hypothesis) or degrades it (the opacity hypothesis)....

Experience goods are characterized by information asymmetry and a lack of ex ante knowledge of product quality, such that reliable external signals of product quality are likely to be highly valued. Two potentially credible sources of such information are reviews from professional critics with...

Customers continuously evaluate the credibility and reliability of a range of signals both separately and jointly. However, existing econometric studies pay insufficient attention to the interactions and complex combinations of these signals, and are typically limited as a result of difficulties...