A wide range of media provide information on many products based on reviews or expert opinions. A natural question is, whether these reviews and expert opinions have any effect on sales. A small but growing literature in economics and marketing science deals with this issue, by testing the...

As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...

News consumers in many authoritarian countries read government-controlled sources even when independent sources are available. We test whether these choices reflect a preference for pro-government coverage versus persistent tastes for specific websites. We exploit textual data from news...

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

School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in stringency and accuracy, (2)...

Newspapers' advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertisers' willingness to pay. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in the...

This article investigates the relationships between the U.S. and Japanese stock market indices and the prices of modern and impressionist paintings sold at auction in New York by Christies and Sotheby. An art price index is constructed to adjust for heterogeneity of individual paintings. Time...

We analyse the relationship between the quality of a GP practice in England and the degree of competition that it faces (as indicated by the number of nearby rival GP practices). We find that those GP practices that are located close to other rival GP practices provide a higher quality of care...