Search Results
Working Paper
Information gathering by a principal
In the standard principal-agent model, the information structure is fixed. In this paper allow the principal to choose his level of informedness before he contracts with the agent. During the contracting phase, the agent never learns what the principal knows about the state of the world. I examine the cases where the agent observes and does not observe the level of informedness that the principal chooses. The strategic nature of the model environment implies that there are both direct and indirect costs associated with the existence of high quality information. The implications for ...
Working Paper
Imperfect state verification and financial contracting
An argument that in a costly state verification model of financial contracting, relaxing the assumption of perfect verification makes the measurement of information difficult.
Report
The persistent effects of a false news shock
In September 2008, a six-year-old article about the 2002 bankruptcy of United Airlines' parent company resurfaced on the Internet and was mistakenly believed to be reporting a new bankruptcy filing by the company. This episode caused the parent company's stock price to drop by as much as 76 percent in just a few minutes, before NASDAQ halted trading. After the "news" had been identified as false, the stock price rebounded, but still ended the day 11.2 percent below the previous close. We use this natural experiment and a simple asset-pricing model to study the aftermath of this false news ...
Journal Article
Foreign exchange: macro puzzles, micro tools
This paper reviews recent progress in applying information-theoretic tools to long-standing exchange rate puzzles. I begin by distinguishing the traditional public information approach (e.g. monetary models, including new open economy models) from the newer dispersed information approach. (The latter focuses on how information is aggregated in the trading process.) I then review empirical results from the dispersed information approach and relate them to two key puzzles, the determination puzzle and the excess volatility puzzle. The dispersed information approach has made progress on both.
Report
What moves the bond market?
We take a close look at a year in the U.S. Treasury market and try to explain the sharpest price changes and most active trading episodes. The virtue of our analysis lies in its use of high-frequency data on market movements and accurate release times for a comprehensive set of economic announcements. For the period August 1993 to August 1994, we attribute the 25 largest price moves and 25 greatest trading surges to just-released announcements. The bond market's response to announcements in general is consistent with the way we would expect it to react to new information.
Working Paper
Financial market breakdown due to strategy constraints and information asymmetry
This paper demonstrates the relevance of strategy constraints on market makers to the possibility of financial market breakdown when there is information asymmetry between market makers and investors; both the case of competitive market makers and the case of a monopolistic market marker are included. Specifically, the paper discusses three types of strategy constraints on the market makers and their implications for the equilibria. The results call attention to the need for more precise specifications of institutional environments (beyond information asymmetry and the mode of ...
Discussion Paper
Dynamic optimal taxation with private information
We study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information. Constrained optimal allocations in these environments are complicated and history-dependent. Yet, we show that they can be implemented as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax systems. The market structure in these economies is similar to that in Bewley (1986): agents supply labor and trade risk-free claims to future consumption, subject to a budget constraint and a debt limit. Optimal taxes are conditioned only on two observable characteristicsan agents accumulated stock of ...
Working Paper
Money talks
The authors study credible information transmission by a benevolent central bank. They consider two possibilities: direct revelation through an announcement, versus indirect information transmission through monetary policy. These two ways of transmitting information have very different consequences. Since the objectives of the central bank and those of individual investors are not always aligned, private investors might rationally ignore announcements by the central bank. In contrast, information transmission through changes in the interest rate creates a distortion, thus lending an amount of ...