This paper presents an empirical investigation of adverse selection in the wholesale used car market. New car dealers (who sell both new and used cars) differ from used car dealers (who sell only used cars) in the propensity to sell trade-ins on the wholesale market. Models of adverse selection suggest that the dealer type that sells a higher proportion of its trade-ins on the wholesale market will sell, on average, cars of higher quality and receive in return a higher price. A survey of dealers' wholesale behavior and prices collected at a wholesale auction are used to test this prediction. I find weak evidence for adverse selection.

Evidence from the Boston condominium market of the early 1990's reveals that an owner's equity position determines his experience as a seller. An owner of a property with a high loan-to-value ratio sets a higher asking price, has a higher expected time on the market and, if he sells, receives a higher price than an owner with proportionately less debt. The down payment requirement for purchasers, but not incumbent owners, provides a simple explanation for this phenomenon among owner-occupants. The results provide supporting evidence for equity-based aggregate theories of price-volume movements in the housing market.

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on price stickiness by documenting a high rate of nominal rigidity among housing rents in the United States between 1974 and 1981. Of the units studied, 29% had no change in nominal rents from year to year. The incidence was much higher (a) in years and cities with a low median nominal rent growth rate, and among (b) units whose tenants continued from the previous year and (c) units in small buildings. A little less than half of the nominal rigidity can be ascribed to grid pricing. Possible explanations, as well as the likely distributive and allocative implications, are discussed.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of adverse selection in the wholesale used car market. New car dealers (who sell both new and used cars) differ from used car dealers (who sell only used cars) in the propensity to sell trade-ins on the wholesale market. Models of adverse selection suggest that the dealer type that sells a higher proportion of its trade-ins on the wholesale market will sell, on average, cars of higher quality and receive in return a higher price. A survey of dealers' wholesale behavior and prices collected at a wholesale auction are used to test this prediction. I find weak evidence for adverse selection.

Detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar-refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude, and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion. The Sugar Institute did not fix prices or output. Prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to make price cutting more transparent. Meetings were used to interpret and adapt the agreement, coordinate on jointly profitable actions, ensure unilateral actions were not misconstrued as cheating, and determine whether cheating had occurred. In contrast to established theories, cheating did occur, but sparked only limited retaliation, partly due to the contractual relations with selling agents.

We shed light on housing price inertia by investigating how the home-sale mechanism affects housing price dynamics. Using Australian data, we find that auction prices forecast better and display less momentum than negotiated prices. These findings are robust to alternative price measurements and different sample selection corrections. Motivated by microtheory that predicts different weights for buyer and seller values in auction and negotiated prices, we decompose housing prices into two diffusion processes and interpret them as buyer value and seller value, respectively. The seller value updates much more slowly, which could be an important driver of housing price inertia.