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Simultaneous Search and Adverse Selection

Sarah Auster, Piero Gottardi, and Ronald Wolthoff

We study the effect of diminishing search frictions in markets with adverse selection by presenting a model in which agents with private information can simultaneously contact multiple trading partners. We highlight a new trade-off: facilitating contacts reduces coordination frictions but also the ability to screen agents’ types. We find that, when agents can contact sufficiently many trading partners, fully separating equilibria obtain only if adverse selection is sufficiently severe. When this condition fails, equilibria feature partial pooling and multiple equilibria co-exist.

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Affiliated Common Value Auctions with Costly Entry

Pauli Murto and Juuso Välimäki

Many auctions and procurement contests entail nontrivial bidding costs, which makes the bidders’ participation decisions endogenous to the auction design. We analyze the effect of different auction rules on potential bidders’ incentives to participate. We focus on first-price auctions with affiliated common values and a large pool of potential bidders. Our main interest is on auctions where the realized number of bidders is unknown at the bidding stage.

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Industrial Policy Implementation: Empirical Evidence from China’s Shipbuilding Industry

Panle Jia Barwick, Myrto Kalouptsidi, and Nahim Bin Zahur

Industrial policies are widely used across the world. In practice, designing and implementing these policies is a complicated task. In this paper, we assess the long-term performance of different industrial policy instruments, which include production subsidies, investment subsidies, entry subsidies, and consolidation policies. To do so, we examine a recent industrial policy in China aiming to propel the country’s shipbuilding industry to the largest globally.

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Arbitration with Uninformed Consumers

Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru

This paper studies the impact of the arbitrator selection process on consumer outcomes. Using data from consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry over the past two decades, where we observe detailed information on case characteristics, the randomly generated list of potential arbitrators presented to both parties, the selected arbitrator, and case outcomes, we establish several motivating facts. These facts suggest that firms hold an informational advantage over consumers in selecting arbitrators, resulting in industry-friendly arbitration outcomes.

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“Bid Shopping” in Procurement Auctions with Subcontracting

Raymond Deneckere and Daniel Quint

We analyze the equilibrium effects of “bid shopping” – a contractor soliciting a subcontractor bid for part of a project prior to a procurement auction, then showing that bid to a competing subcontractor in an attempt to secure a lower price. Such conduct is widely criticized as unethical by professional organizations, and has been the target of legislation at both the federal and state level, but is widespread in procurement auctions in many places.

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A Theory of Cash Flow-Based Financing with Distress Resolution

Barney Hartman-Glaser, Simon Mayer, and Konstantin Milbradt

We develop a dynamic contracting theory of asset- and cash flow-based financing that demonstrates how firm, intermediary, and capital market characteristics jointly shape firms’ financing constraints. A firm with imperfect access to equity financing covers financing needs through costly sources: an intermediary and retained cash. The firm’s financing capacity is endogenously determined by either the liquidation value of assets (asset-based) or the intermediary’s going-concern valuation of the firm’s cash flows (cash flow-based).

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Wealth Inequality and Asset Prices

Matthieu Gomez

Wealthy households disproportionately invest in equity, causing equity returns to generate large and persistent fluctuations in top wealth inequality. Motivated by this observation, I study the joint dynamics of asset prices and wealth inequality in a model where a subset of agents (“entrepreneurs”) hold levered positions on the economy. In the model, as in the data, the wealth distribution is stochastic and it exhibits a Pareto tail, with a tail index that depends on the logarithmic average return of top households.

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Melons as Lemons: Asymmetric Information, Consumer Learning and Seller Reputation

Jie Bai

Quality provision is often low in many developing markets, and firms commonly lack a reputation for quality. This paper examines this issue both theoretically and empirically in the context of retail watermelon markets in China. I first demonstrate the existence of significant asymmetric information on quality between sellers and buyers, as well as the absence of a quality premium at baseline. To explain this, I develop a theoretical model that highlights the role of consumer beliefs and costly signaling in influencing sellers’ reputation incentives.

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This paper started with data. We were convinced that the discrepancy between book and market values of banks was key to understanding the data. We then developed a theory where, with a simple model, only one state variable driving Tobin's Q, you can explain several data moments.

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"We provide a guide for researchers on how to estimate gene-environment (GxE) interplay, using school-starting age as a case study. We argue that gene-environment (G x E) studies can help

(i) assess treatment effect heterogeneity,
(ii) test theoretical predictions, and 👇

1/

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"We are thrilled to share that our latest research is now published in @RevEconStudies! 🎉Check it out here:
https://www.restud.com/a-q-theory-of-banks/

We look forward to hearing your thoughts! "

@JulianeBegenau, @SakiBigio, Majerovitz, and Vieyra

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