Conventional wisdom suggests that high-reputation banks will generally produce good securities to maintain their long-run reputation. We show with a simple model that when securities are complex a high-reputation bank may produce assets that underperform during market downturns. We examine this...

Characteristics of the investment banking industry, particularly the extreme concentration of spreads at exactly 7%, seem consistent with some form of collusion through which underwriters can extract surplus from the IPO. I present a model of investment banking that, under the assumption of...

We propose a labor market model in which financial firms compete for a scarce supply of workers who can either be employed as traders or as bankers. While hiring bankers allows to create a surplus that can be split between a firm and its trading counterparties, hiring traders helps to...

We develop a dynamic model of entry, exit, and firm quality in the market for issuance and trading of complex financial securities. Firm quality has two dimensions; security production expertise, which creates a positive externality for other firms, and trading expertise, which allows firms to...

I consider the model of expertise acquisition studied in Glode, Green, and Lowery (2012), under the alternative assumption that investment in expertise is unobservable. This model generates cross sectional variation in expertise levels and produces price dispersion

It is a core principle of antitrust law and theory that reduced market concentration lowers the risk of anticompetitive behavior. We demonstrate that this principle is fundamentally incomplete.Traditional models assume that firms interact only as competitors. We examine and model...

We present an industry classification–level model of economic activities in terms of (1) risk of the novel coronavirus spread and (2) economic contribution for the Austin, Texas, metropolitan area. Our measure combines various categories of activities that seem to lead to viral spread. We...

We generalize and correct a model of bargaining with endogenous information acquisition proposed by Dang (2008). Allowing for asymmetric information costs, we show that the opportunity to obtain information during the bargaining process can lead to inefficient outcomes when the responder's cost...

Academia faces a challenge, as activism replaces inquiry as the primary goal of the university. In particular, the growing dominance of activist academics, who explicitly reject objective inquiry, has started and will continue to constrain what information researchers can report and what ideas...