Search Results
Discussion Paper
Tax Buyouts: Raising Government Revenues without Increasing Labor Tax Distortions
At a time of increasing fiscal pressures both here and abroad, it seems important to consider ways of raising government revenues without discouraging people from working. This post describes a revenue raising plan—a tax “buyout”—that does just that. The buyout would give you, the taxpayer, the option each year of paying a lump sum to the government in exchange for a given reduction in your marginal tax rate that year. In effect, you would use the lump sum payment to buy yourself a lower marginal tax rate, which would in turn give you more incentive to work. The buyout would be risk ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Large Investors on Asset Quality: Evidence from Subprime Mortgage Securities
The government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?the dominant investors in subprime mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 crisis?substantively affected collateral composition in this market. Mortgages included in securities designed for the GSEs performed better than those backing other securities in the same deals, holding observable risk constant. Consistent with the transmission of private information, these effects are concentrated in low-documentation loans and for issuers that were highly dependent on the GSEs and were corporate affiliates of the mortgage ...
Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. We use a mechanism-design approach to induce the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) the optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information, (ii) the optimal protection policy is time consistent under public information but not ...
Working Paper
Computing Equilibria of Stochastic Heterogeneous Agent Models Using Decision Rule Histories
This paper introduces a general method for computing equilibria with heterogeneous agents and aggregate shocks that is particularly suitable for economies with private information. Instead of the cross-sectional distribution of agents across individual states, the method uses as a state variable a vector of spline coefficients describing a long history of past individual decision rules. Applying the computational method to a Mirrlees RBC economy with known analytical solution recovers the solution perfectly well. This test provides considerable confidence on the accuracy of the method.
Discussion Paper
Are All CLOs Equal?
Asset securitization is an important source of corporate funding in capital markets. Collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) are securitization structures that allow syndicated bank lenders and bond underwriters to repackage business loans and sell them to investors as securities. CLOs are actively overseen by a collateral manager that has the responsibility to trade loans in the portfolio to benefit from gains and mitigate losses from credit exposures. Because CLOs include a diverse portfolio of loans, a single firm that commingles its lending role with the collateral management role can reap ...
Working Paper
Credit Ratings, Private Information, and Bank Monitoring Ability
In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private information increases with the size of loans.
Working Paper
Business Cycle Fluctuations in Mirrlees Economies: The Case of i.i.d. Shocks
I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about the i.i.d. realizations of their value of leisure. For the case of logarithmic preferences I provide an analytical characterization of the solution to the associated mechanism design problem. Moreover, I show a striking irrelevance result: That the stationary behavior of all aggregate variables are exactly the same in the private information economy as in the full information case. Numerical simulations indicate that the irrelevance result approximately holds for more general CRRA preferences.
Working Paper
How Do Lead Banks Use Their Private Information about Loan Quality in the Syndicated Loan Market?
We formulate and test two opposing hypotheses about how lead banks in the syndicated loan market use private information about loan quality, the Signaling Hypothesis and Sophisticated Syndicate Hypothesis. We use Shared National Credit (SNC) internal loan ratings made comparable using concordance tables to measure private information. We find favorable private information is associated with higher lead bank loan retention and lower interest rate spreads for pure term loans, ceteris paribus, supporting the Signaling Hypothesis. Neither hypothesis dominates for pure revolvers. The data ...
Working Paper
Investment and Bilateral Insurance
Private information may limit insurance possibilities when two agents get together to pool idiosyncratic risk. However, if there is capital accumulation, bilateral insurance possibilities may improve because misreporting distorts investment. We show that if one of the Pareto weights is sufficiently large, that agent does not have incentives to misreport. This implies that, under some conditions, the full information allocation is incentive compatible when agents have equal Pareto weights. In the long run, either one of the agents goes to immiseration, or both agents’ lifetime utilities are ...