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Report
Who Sees the Trades? The Effect of Information on Liquidity in Inter-Dealer Markets
Dealers, who strategically supply liquidity to traders, are subject to both liquidity and adverse selection costs. While liquidity costs can be mitigated through inter-dealer trading, individual dealers? private motives to acquire information compromise inter-dealer market liquidity. Post-trade information disclosure can improve market liquidity by counteracting dealers? incentives to become better informed through their market-making activities. Asymmetric disclosure, however, exacerbates the adverse selection problem in inter-dealer markets, in turn decreasing equilibrium liquidity ...
Working Paper
Supplier relationships and small business use of trade credit
This paper sheds some light on the empirical importance of supplier relationships, including ethnic ties, for the use of trade credit by minority-owned small businesses. Results based on the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance (NSSBF) indicate that ethnic differences in the use of trade credit are present after conditioning on an extensive list of control variables. This holds especially for Black-owned businesses, and we find that they use less trade credit, are less likely to take advantage of discounts for early payment, and are more likely to have payments past due. We use ...
Report
Resource Allocation in Bank Supervision: Trade-offs and Outcomes
We estimate a structural model of resource allocation on work hours of Federal Reserve bank supervisors to disentangle how supervisory technology, preferences, and resource constraints impact bank outcomes. We find a significant effect of supervision on bank risk and large technological scale economies with respect to bank size. Consistent with macro-prudential objectives, revealed supervisory preferences disproportionately weight larger banks, especially post-2008 when a resource reallocation to larger banks increased risk on average across all banks. Shadow cost estimates show tight ...
Working Paper
Mechanism design and assignment models
This mechanism design paper studies the assignment of people to projects over time. Inability to communicate interim shocks is a force for long-term assignments, though exceptions exist for high risk aversion. In contrast, costless reporting of interim shocks makes switching powerful for virtually all environments. Switching elicits honest reports and mitigates incentive constraints allowing, in particular, beneficial concealment of project quality. Properties of the production technology are also shown to matter. Substitutability of intertemporal effort is a force for long-term assignments ...
Working Paper
Integrated household surveys: an assessment of U.S. methods and an innovation
We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts?-balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows?-are used to assess the degree of integration in leading U.S. household surveys, focusing on inconsistencies in measures of the change in cash. Diaries of consumer payment choice can improve dynamic integration. Using payments data, we construct a statement of liquidity flows: a detailed ...
Journal Article
Monetary theory and electronic money : reflections on the Kenyan experience
This article uses a class of models of money and the payments system to inform an analysis of "mobile banking" in the context of the rapid expansion of M-PESA, a new technology in Kenya that allows payments via mobile phones (even without any access to a bank account), and currently reaches close to 38 percent of Kenyan adults. The separation of households and firms in space and time suggests, in theory, from various separate models, a number of implications. These include (i) the potential gain, under some circumstances, from allowing net e-money credit creation, (ii) the impact that the ...
Report
Barriers to household risk management: evidence from India
Financial engineering offers the potential to significantly reduce the consumption fluctuations faced by individuals, households, and firms. Yet much of this potential remains unfulfilled. This paper studies the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product designed to compensate low-income Indian farmers in the event of insufficient rainfall during the primary monsoon season. We first document relatively low adoption of this new risk management product: Only 5-10 percent of households purchase the insurance, even though they overwhelmingly cite rainfall variability as their most ...
Journal Article
Small business finance in two Chicago minority neighborhoods
The authors use survey data to measure the use of formal and informal sources of financing by owners of small businesses in two ethnic neighborhoods. The authors find substantial differences across ethnic groups in the amount of start-up funding obtained and in the use of trade credit.