Regulation of the use of cellular phones by individuals while driving is now commonplace outside the United States and has been proposed in a number of jurisdictions in the United States. There is growing concern that using cellular phones while driving leads to increases in accidents and...

This chapter reviews and synthesizes a rapidly growing subfield that analyzes the relation between media and financial markets. Research in this area identifies novel data sources, such as newspaper articles, Internet search queries, and posts on social networks, and employs inventive empirical...

In response to the increasing impact of regulation, several governments have introduced economic analysis as a way of trying to improve regulatory policy. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of government-supported economic analysis of regulation. We find that there is growing...

People often make important decisions based on information elicited from experts with uncertain preferences. We provide a theoretical rationale for the use of information markets in decision making tasks. Specifically, we show that markets for claims on decision-relevant variables can be...

This paper offers a new approach to economic development, which we call performance-based policy. The basic idea is to get better information to implement better development decisions. The approach combines the use of information markets with payments for performance. An information market is a...

Information markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcomeof an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. The prices in these markets provide useful information about a particular issue, such as a president's reelection probability. The purpose of this...

We identify model-free mispricing factors and relate them to global stock prices and investor beliefs. The factors measure variation in the relative mispricing of closed-end funds and their underlying assets. We design three factors to reflect the beliefs and capital flows of important...

Over-the-counter (OTC) stocks are far less liquid, disclose less information, and exhibit lower institutional holdings than listed stocks. We exploit these different market conditions to test theories of cross-sectional return premiums. Compared to premiums in listed markets, the OTC illiquidity...

This article tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish between new and old information about firms. I define the staleness of a news story as its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. I find that firms' stock returns respond less to stale news....