Certifiers contribute to the sound functioning of markets by reducing asymmetric information. They, however, have been heavily criticized during the 2008-09 financial crisis. This paper investigates on which side of the market a monopolistic profit-maximizing certifier offers his service. If the...

We provide elementary insights into the effectiveness of certification to increase market transparency. In a market with opaque product quality, sellers use certification as a signaling device, while buyers use it as an inspection device. This difference alone implies that seller-certification...

We provide elementary insights into the effectiveness of certification to increase market transparency. In a market with opaque product quality, sellers use certification as a signaling device, while buyers use it as an inspection device. This difference alone implies that seller-certification...

It is often argued that certifiers have an incentive to offer inflated certificates, although they deny it. In this paper, we study a model in which a certifier is paid by sellers, and may offer them inflated certificates, but incurs costs if doing so. We find that the certifier may face a...

The authors conducted a global study of the long-term issuer ratings of nonfinancial firms from Standard and Poor's Ratings Services (S&P) for the period 1998–2003. Specifically, they focused on the solicited versus unsolicited ratings and sample-selection bias in the analysis. Unlike the...

Recent empirical studies suggest that, during times of unexpected innovation, agents heterogeneously update their beliefs about an asset fundamental value, and they are uncertain about other agents' beliefs on it. In this paper I show that, when there is uncertainty about the market sentiment,...

Leveraging the detailed project-level data on biotech startups and their IPO records, this paper studies how adverse selection in capital markets affects financing decisions of entrepreneurs and firm values. By structurally estimating a dynamic model that features strategic experimentation and...

This paper analyzes debt-equity choice for financing a two-stage investment when a firm’s insiders have private information about the firm’s expected earnings. When private information is one-dimensional (for example when short-term earnings are common knowledge while long-term earnings are...