Labor market intermediaries play an important role in turnover in many labor markets. This paper analyzes one class of such intermediaries, namely, search firms. We first model the hiring decision of the firm in both succession and replacement planning. We show that employers will, in equilibrium, use search firms to find new hires even where the search firms have no technological advantage in search. This can be interpreted as being due to the search firms' ability to diversify away sampling risk.

We investigate the corporate social responsibility of banks. Lenders offer loans to standard and motivated borrowers who undertake either standard or ethical projects. Standard banks have no restriction on the types of projects for which they can provide a loan. Ethical banks, instead, commit to financing only ethical projects, which have social profitability but lower expected revenues. Motivated borrowers are keen to invest in ethical projects and to deal with ethical banks. When they are active, ethical banks increase social welfare because the matching of ethical lenders with motivated borrowers reduces the frictions caused by the agency issue.

The availability of big data and analytics expertise provides insurers with informational advantages over policyholders in estimating risk. We study competition between heterogeneously informed insurers, showing that their information may or may not be revealed in equilibrium. We find that all equilibria are profitable and that noninformative equilibria entail risk pooling and possibly efficiency. In informative equilibria, the signaling problem interacts with the screening problem that arises endogenously from insurers’ revelation of information, implying underinsurance. Our main insights are robust to changes in insurers’ information precision and market concentration and to the presence of two-sided asymmetric information and withdrawable contracts.