Newspaper critics' movie reviews are often used by potential movie viewers as signals of expert quality assessment. In this paper, we assess if there is any racial bias in these critics' reviews, and if so, what impact these biases have on viewer demand. To do this, we develop a dataset that...

We study dual agency in residential real estate, where the same agent/agency represents both the buyer and seller. We assess the extent to which dual agency suffers from an inherent conflict of interest, where the dual agent furthers the interest of one client at the expense of the other...

We generalize the model of Burdett and Judd (1983) to the case where an arbitrary finite number of firms sells a homogeneous good to buyers who have heterogeneous search costs. We show that a price dispersed symmetric Nash equilibrium always exists. Numerical results show that the behavior of...

This paper studies consumer search and pricing behaviour in the British domestic electricity market following its opening to competition in 1999. We develop a sequential search model in which an incumbent and an entrant group compete for consumers who find it costly to obtain information on...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy...

This paper studies the identification of the costs of simultaneous search in a class of (portfolio) problems studied by Chade and Smith (2006). We show that aggregate data from a single market, or disaggregate data from a single market segment, do not provide sufficient information to identify...

This note discusses methodological issues and practical concerns for international economists and international business scholars who apply the gravity equation in their research. The most important message of the note is that this equation should correct for multilateral resistance factors. We...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy response...

Using a large data set on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various classical search models. We nd that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known distributions of prices can be rejected based on the recall patterns we...

This paper finds that the stock of bilateral investment treaties (BIT) is subject to diminishing returns measured in terms of foreign direct investment flows. Diminishing returns are more pronounced among country-pairs that have not signed bilateral investment treaties but have their own BIT...