Search Results
Working Paper
Information systems for risk management
Risk management information systems are designed to overcome the problem of aggregating data across diverse trading units. The design of an information system depends on the risk measurement methodology that a firm chooses. Inherent in the design of both a risk management information system and a risk measurement methodology is a tradeoff between the accuracy of the resulting measures of risk and the burden of computing them. Technical progress will make this tradeoff more favorable over time, leading firms to implement more accurate methodologies, such as full revaluation of nonlinear ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Decentralized production and public liquidity with private information
Firms with private information about the outcomes of production under uncertainty may face capital (liquidity) constraints that prevent them from attaining efficient levels of investment in a world with costly and/or imperfect monitoring. As an alternative, we examine the efficiency of a simple pooling scheme designed to provide a public (cooperative) supply of liquidity that results in the first best outcome for economic growth. We show that if, absent aggregate uncertainty, the elasticity of scale of the production technology is sufficiently small, then efficient levels of investment and ...
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 ...
Working Paper
A theory of money and banking
The authors construct a simple environment that combines a limited communication friction and a limited information friction in order to generate a role for money and intermediation. They ask whether there is any reason to expect the emergence of a banking sector (i.e., institutions that combine the business of money creation with the business of intermediation). In their model, the unique equilibrium is characterized partly by the existence of an agent that: (1) creates money (a debt instrument that circulates as a means of payment); (2) lends it out (swapping it for less liquid forms of ...
Working Paper
Voluntary disclosure under imperfect competition: Experimental evidence
This study investigates disclosure behavior when a manager has incentives to influence the actions of a product market competitor in a Cournot duopoly. Theoretical research suggests that under various conditions the manager has incentives to withhold some signals and disclose others. Using an experimental economics method, we find support for partial information disclosure. Our results suggest that when the manager receives private information about industrywide cost, unfavorable (favorable) information is disclosed (withheld) and the competitor adjusts production accordingly. In contrast, ...
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
Information ambiguity: recognizing its role in financial markets