During the COVID-19 pandemic, some goods suddenly became scarce due to panic purchases and stockpiling. The decision to hoard is influenced by higher-order beliefs. If an agent believes that other agents think that a good will become scarce, she concludes that these other agents will hoard, and...

Crowdfunding, a novel form of financing, has seen massive growth over the last few years. Under crowdfunding, a large number of small households offers small loans to a firm. But if some threshold is missed, the firm cannot draw the loans. We construct a model to argue that this mechanism can be...

This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of “creditor rights” and “information sharing” throughout over 1.8 million private firms in Europe. We show that many of the outcomes associated with greater levels of creditor rights can be obtained with higher...