Longevity Expectations and Death: Can People Predict Their Own Demise? by V. Kerry Smith, Donald H. Taylor and Frank A. Sloan. Published in volume 91, issue 4, pages 1126-1134 of American Economic Review, September 2001

Examining the contractual disclosures during the sale of private‐label residential mortgage‐backed securities before the 2008 financial crisis, we find that textual contents in the risk‐factor section predict subsequent losses and yet were not reflected in pricing. Insurance companies, especially life insurers and insurers with low regulatory capital ratios, are more exposed to textual risks. Consistent with issuers hedging litigation risks with disclosure, we find that textual contents are associated with second‐lien underreporting and preissuance written communications. Overall, we find that investors neglected risks in the purportedly safe assets before the crisis.

B. H. Beckhart, Carl F. Behrens, George N. Emory, Shirley K. Hart, James J. O'Leary, A. M. Weimer, Liquidity: A Growing Attribute of Mortgage Loan Portfolios: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Dec., 1950), pp. 324-336

Social network data are often prohibitively expensive to collect, limiting empirical network research. We propose an inexpensive and feasible strategy for network elicitation using Aggregated Relational Data (ARD): responses to questions of the form "how many of your links have trait k ?" Our method uses ARD to recover parameters of a network formation model, which permits sampling from a distribution over node- or graph-level statistics. We replicate the results of two field experiments that used network data and draw similar conclusions with ARD alone.

We examine high stakes three-person bargaining in a game show where contestants bargain over a large money amount that is split into three unequal shares. We find that individual behavior and outcomes are strongly influenced by equity concerns: those who contributed more to the jackpot claim larger shares, are less likely to make concessions, and take home larger amounts. Contestants who announce that they will not back down do well relative to others, but they do not secure larger absolute amounts and they harm others. There is no evidence of a first-mover advantage and little evidence that demographic characteristics matter.