Repayment performance in group lending: Evidence from Jordan

Using data from a survey of 160 urban borrowing groups of the Microfund for Women in Jordan, we investigate the effect of screening, peer monitoring, group pressure, and social ties on borrowing groups' repayment behavior as an indirect test of different theoretical models. The dependent variable used captures the intensity of default measured by the total number of days of late repayment after each due date, allowing us to use count data models with cluster standard errors. As theory predicts, our empirical analysis suggests that peer monitoring, group pressure, and social ties reduce delinquency. The paper uncovers interesting evidence about the role of social ties and religion. Most notably, in an area where religion contributes to attitudes and beliefs of individuals, we find that religiosity improves repayment performance.     

Smart fund managers? Stupid money?

Abstract .  We develop a model of mutual fund manager investment decisions near the end of quarters. We show that when investors reward better performing funds with higher cash flows, near quarter-ends a mutual fund manager has an incentive to distort new investment toward stocks in which his fund holds a large existing position. The short-term price impact of these trades increase the fund's reported returns. Higher returns are rewarded by greater subsequent fund inflows which, in turn, allow for more investment distortion the next quarter. Because the price impact of trades is short term, each subsequent quarter begins with a larger return deficit. Eventually, the deficit cannot be overcome. Thus, our model leads to the empirically observed short-run persistence and long-run reversal in fund performance. In doing so, our model provides a consistent explanation of many other seemingly contradictory empirical features of mutual fund performance.     

Asymmetric group loans,non-assortative matching and adverse selection

This paper shows that an asymmetric group debt contract, where one borrower co-signs for another, but not vice versa, leads to heterogeneous matching. The analysis suggests that micro finance organizations can achieve the first best by offering asymmetric group contracts.     

An equilibrium analysis of information aggregation and fluctuations in markets with discrete decisions

This paper shows how the interaction between decentralized information gathering and discreteness of investment decisions at the individual level can generate random fluctuations in aggregate investment that involve occasionally large allocation errors. This interaction is illustrated in a model in which private information is costly to acquire and prices reveal information. The unique rational expectations equilibrium outcome of the model is shown to always be noisy and characterized by investment levels which may be high simply because uninformed investors are buying under the impression that the high price is a signal of good investment opportunities.     

Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation

In a finite-trader version of the Diamond and Dybvig (J. Polit. Econ. 91 (1983) 401) model, the ex ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader. When the model is modified by formalizing the sequential-service constraint (cf. Wallace (Fed. Reserve Bank Minneapolis Quart. Rev. 12 (1988) 3)), the truth-telling equilibrium implements the symmetric, ex ante efficient allocation with respect to iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies.     

Direct versus intermediated finance: An old question and a new answer

We consider a closed economy where a risk neutral bank competes with a competitive bond market. Firms can finance a risky project either by a bank credit or by issuing a bond which is directly sold to risk averse investors who also hold safe deposits at the bank. We show that the bank tends to allocate more capital to lower quality projects but there are some interesting qualifications. If the asymmetric information concerns only the success probability, then we observe adverse selection while if it concerns only the expected return, bad types are driven out of the market.     

Bank incentives, contract design and bank runs

We study the Diamond-Dybvig [Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity, J. Polit. Econ. 91 (1983) 401-419] model as developed in Green and Lin [Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation, J. Econ. Theory 109 (2003) 1-23] and Peck and Shell [Equilibrium bank runs, J. Polit. Econ. 111 (2003) 103-123]. We dispense with the notion of a bank as a coalition of depositors. Instead, our bank is a self-interested agent with a technological advantage in record-keeping. We examine the implications of the resulting agency problem for the design of bank contracts and the possibility of bank-run equilibria. For a special case, we discover that the agency problem may or may not simplify the qualitative structure of bank liabilities. We also find that the uniqueness result in Green and Lin [Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation, J. Econ. Theory 109 (2003) 1-23] is robust to our form of agency, but that the non-uniqueness result in Peck and Shell [Equilibrium bank runs, J. Polit. Econ. 111 (2003) 103-123] is not.     

Informed manipulation

In asymmetric information models of financial markets, prices imperfectly reveal the private information held by traders. Informed insiders thus have an incentive not only to trade less aggressively but also to manipulate the market by trading in the wrong direction and undertaking short-term losses, thereby increasing the noise in the trading process. In this paper we show that when the market faces uncertainty about the existence of the insider in the market and when there is a large number of trading periods before all private information is revealed, long-lived informed traders will manipulate in every equilibrium.     

How equilibrium prices reveal information in a time series model with disparately informed, competitive traders

Accommodating asymmetric information in a dynamic asset pricing model is technically challenging due to the problems associated with higher-order expectations. That is, rational investors are forced into a situation where they must forecast the forecasts of other agents. In a dynamic setting, this problem telescopes into the infinite future and the dimension of the relevant state space approaches infinity. By using the frequency domain approach of Whiteman [Linear Rational Expectations Models: A User's Guide, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983] and Kasa [Forecasting the forecasts of others in the frequency domain, Rev. Econ. Dynam. 3 (2000) 726-756], this paper demonstrates how information structures previously believed to preserve asymmetric information in equilibrium, converge to a symmetric information, rational expectations equilibrium. The revealing aspect of the price process lies in the invertibility of the observed state space, which makes it possible for agents to infer the economically fundamental shocks and thus eliminating the need to forecast the forecasts of others.     

Germany's New Insider Law: The Empirical Evidence after the First Year

Abstract. This paper investigates insider trading activities in German stocks during the first year following implementation of the new Insider Law on 1 July 2002. It can be observed that insiders act as contrarian investors. They buy stocks after prices have fallen and sell stocks after prices have risen. In general, insider trades are very profitable. A typical stock purchased by an insider yields an abnormal return of almost 3 per cent during the 25 days following the transaction. In contrast, a typical stock that has been sold by insiders achieves an abnormal return of nearly −3 per cent over the same time period. Outsiders who copy the transactions of insiders can achieve nearly the same abnormal returns. Abnormal returns remain substantial even after transaction costs. The results suggest that prices of stocks in which insiders trade do not seem to be semi-strong efficient.     

Asymmetric Information,Auditing Commitment,and Economic Growth

We analyze in this paper the growth and welfare consequences stemming from the lack of auditing commitment in a credit market with costly state verification. By studying two endogenous growth models, one of which allows lenders to commit to costly auditing strategies, whereas the other does not, we show that the inability to commit serves as a source of informational friction that results in more stringent contractual terms, which, in turn, result in lower capital accumulation, growth, and welfare. From the policy perspective, our analysis suggests a new micro‐economic channel through which institutional failings hinder economic growth and social welfare.     

Disorganization and financial collapse

Since the fall of communism, the former Soviet Union experienced a strong output decline and a dramatic increase in arrears and barter. We develop a model which explains how these three phenomena are connected. We introduce liquidity and credit constraints into a model of disorganization and show how these problems can alleviate the hold-up problem. We argue further that barter creates a hostage that allows to deal with disorganization when credit enforcement becomes prohibitively costly. Based on a firm survey in Ukraine in 1997, we test how input shortages, financial shortages and barter affect output growth of firms.     

The relationship banking paradox: No pain no gain versus raison d'être

Relationship banking paradox refers to the case that credit market competition may threaten relationship banking practice, but it may stimulate it as well because of differentiation. Using a mixed model of adverse selection and double moral hazard, this paper shows that for some parameter values, relationship banking arises even when the banks compete à la Bertrand, hence supporting the no pain no gain hypothesis. This is due to multilayer nature of the information asymmetry by double moral hazard where an outside bank that does not have the borrower's proprietary information is unable to exert optimal levels of effort in the continuation game.     

AN OPTIMAL SCHEME FOR INJECTING PUBLIC FUNDS UNDER THE MORAL HAZARD INCENTIVE FOR BANKS

I consider whether the injection of cash funds into a bank through the purchase of securities together with a bank closure policy can be designed as a strong incentive instrument for preventing the bank from taking moral hazard action in the presence of deposit insurance. Under certain conditions, the regulator's optimal policy can be to inject new cash funds into a bank through the purchase of securities, even though there are no bankruptcy costs. Furthermore, the regulator may transform the private bank into a government-owned bank. However, this kind of injection policy cannot be independent of the bank closure policy.     

Herding in delegated portfolio management: When is comparative performance information desirable?

We address the issue of investors’ asset allocation decisions when portfolio management is delegated to an agent. Contrary to predictions from traditional financial theory, it is shown that investors may not induce their manager to allocate funds to the asset with the highest return. Instead they may herd in their asset allocation decision and induce trade in a particular asset, because another manager is trading in it and despite the presence of a more profitable alternative. Doing so allows investors to write an efficiency-improving relative-performance contract. On the other hand, herding leads investors to design wage contracts strategically, resulting in more aggressive and thus less profitable trade in equilibrium. We show that herding occurs, when the cost of information is high, information precision is low and when managers are sufficiently risk averse. Moreover, when investors can decide whether or not to disclose information about their manager's performance, they will not do so.     

Portfolio choice, attention allocation, and price comovement

This paper models the attention allocation of portfolio investors. Investors choose the composition of their information subject to an information flow constraint. Given their expected investment strategy in the next period, which is to hold a diversified portfolio, in equilibrium investors choose to observe one linear combination of asset payoffs as a private signal. When investors use this private signal to update information about two assets, changes in one asset affect both asset prices and may lead to asset price comovement. The model also has implications for the transmission of volatility shocks between two assets.