Financial contracts,opportunism, and disclosure management

This article shows that if all variables that determine a firm's future cash flows are not contractible, it can be ex ante optimal to design a financial contract that admits debtholders waiving debt covenants on a discretionary basis and firms investing opportunistically subsequent to contracting. Further, as the contractible variable becomes less informative, the contract attaches greater significance to it. Finally, uncertainty in the magnitude of reporting latitude induces aggressive reporting by the firm to avoid violating the covenant or to enhance the chances of a waiver. The debtholders respond by sometimes not allowing the firm to implement mutually beneficial projects.     

Management friendship and insider opportunism

This study documents a significant increase in both trading activity and profitability of opportunistic top managers when a CEO develops a strong connection with subordinate executives through co-opting the executives who share social ties with him/her. This baseline evidence is robust to endogeneity concerns, alternative measures of management connection and insider opportunism, as well as controlling for other CEO and board attributes. Further analyses reveal that interpersonal connections between top managers are more likely to increase opportunistic insider trading in firms with lower-quality voluntary disclosures, more sociable executives, and relaxing legal barriers to insider trades. Increased insider opportunism in response to the CEO’s connection with other top executives engenders less informative stock prices and depresses stock market liquidity. Finally, insider trades in firms with stronger management connection are more predictive of future stock returns.     

Banks,financial markets,and social welfare

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model of banking and financial markets. The model allows to compare financial systems in which banks have access to financial markets with financial systems in which banks do not have access to financial markets. Allen and Gale [A welfare comparison of intermediaries and financial markets in Germany and the US. European Economic Review 39 (1995) 179–209] find that the Anglo-Saxon model of financial intermediation in which financial markets play a dominant role does not necessarily improve social welfare in comparison with the German model in which banks dominate. Our model provides a theoretical foundation for this view.     

Market liquidity, asset prices, and welfare

This paper represents an equilibrium model for the demand and supply of liquidity and its impact on asset prices and welfare. We show that, when constant market presence is costly, purely idiosyncratic shocks lead to endogenous demand of liquidity and large price deviations from fundamentals. Moreover, market forces fail to lead to efficient supply of liquidity, which calls for potential policy interventions. However, we demonstrate that different policy tools can yield different efficiency consequences. For example, lowering the cost of supplying liquidity on the spot (e.g., through direct injection of liquidity or relaxation of ex post margin constraints) can decrease welfare while forcing more liquidity supply (e.g., through coordination of market participants) can improve welfare.     

Capital taxation,investment, growth,and welfare

This paper formulates a model of economic growth to study the effects of broad capital taxation (of profits, dividends, and capital gains) on macroeconomic outcomes in small open economies. A framework of exogenous growth permits modeling countries in transition to a country-specific steady state and to discern steady-state and transitory effects of shocks on economic outcomes. The chosen framework is amenable to structural estimation and, in view of the parsimony of the model, fits data on 79 countries over the period 1996–2011 well. The counterfactual analysis based on the estimated model suggests that capital-tax reductions induce positive effects on output and the capital stock (per unit of effective labor) that are economically significant and are accommodated within time windows of 5 years without much further economic response after that. The responses of economic aggregates are found to be relatively strongest to changes in corporate-profit-tax rates and weaker for dividend and capital-gains taxes.     

Nonlinear pricing and exclusion: I. buyer opportunism

We study the exclusionary properties of nonlinear price‐quantity schedules in an Aghion‐Bolton style model with elastic demand and product differentiation. We distinguish three regimes, depending on whether and how the price charged by the dominant firm depends on the quantity purchased from the rival firm. We find that the supply of rival good is distorted downward. Moreover, given the quantity supplied from the rival, the buyer may opportunistically purchase inefficiently many units from the dominant firm to pocket quantity rebates. We show that the possibility for the buyer to dispose of unconsumed units attenuates the opportunism problem and limits the exclusionary effects of nonlinear pricing.     

Bank runs, welfare and policy implications

This paper studies the welfare implications of various government policies that have been used to prevent bank runs. The benchmark model suggests that a bank run is a business-cycle-state-related phenomenon and it leads to the failure of the risk-sharing mechanism provided by the banking sector. Extensions of the model show that a number of policy instruments, including the suspension of convertibility of deposits, the taxation on short-term deposits, reserve requirement and blanket guarantee, turn out to be inefficient. Instead, I propose that a limited-coverage deposit insurance scheme or capital requirements can be welfare-improving.     

Tourism, globalization, social externalities, and domestic welfare

One of the impacts of globalisation has been the growth in tourism and mobility of capital. This paper examines the welfare effect of tourism on the host economy with imperfect competition. Three channels that affects domestic welfare by tourism are: social externalities accompanied with tourists, the terms of trade effect via rises in the non-tradable prices, and the resource movement effect to the manufacturing sector. Owing to the positive terms-of-trade effect and/or the beneficial resource movement effect, the optimal levels of tourism occur at the situations that tourists bring negative social externalities to the economy.     

Controlling opportunism in vertical contracting when production precedes sales

In a make‐to‐stock vertical contracting setting with private contracts, when retailers do not observe each other's stocks before choosing their prices, an opportunism problem always exist in contract equilibria but public market‐wide Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) can restore monopoly power. However other widely used tools which do not fall under antitrust scrutiny and require only private bilateral contracts, such as buyback contracts, also allow the producer to fully exercise his monopoly power. We conclude that a more lenient policy toward RPM is unlikely to affect the producer's ability to control opportunism.     

Sourcing parts of complex products: evidence on transactions costs, high-powered incentives and ex-post opportunism

This paper revisits evidence on the correlates of sourcing decisions in the US auto industry to see whether adoption of new contracting terms and early involvement of suppliers in design activities (e.g. “relational contracting”) yields different results as compared to previous findings. Previous studies find that US auto firms insource complex parts that require investments in specific assets. Absent large differences in production costs, the results suggest that transactions costs associated with external suppliers exceed transactions costs associated with internal suppliers (e.g. loss of high powered incentives). Using data on 156 sourcing decisions for process tooling (dies) of a new car program we find that under the new relational contracting regime, transaction cost theory continues to have explanatory power for sourcing decisions; however, attributes that favored insourcing in previous studies favor outsourcing in this setting. Moreover, more complex subassemblies are associated with fewer distinct suppliers than expected — evidence of a tendency to co-locate decision rights to reduce transactions costs related to system interactions. After controlling for transaction characteristics that are associated with the sourcing decision, we find no evidence that outsourcing is associated with increased ex post opportunism by the firm (e.g. agreement about contract completion); however, outsourced parts are submitted by suppliers for evaluation significantly later than insourced parts (e.g. delivery holdup).     

Securitized markets,international capital flows,and global welfare

We study the effect of collateralized lending and securitization on international capital flows and welfare in a two-country general equilibrium model with idiosyncratic investment risk. The low-margin country (Home) endogenously supplies more safe assets and enables more risk sharing. Upon financial integration, capital flows from Foreign (high-margin country) to Home, leading to lower interest rates and a larger global supply of safe assets. Unlike in standard models with partial equity issuance, in our model, Home can lose from financial integration due to the endogenous reduction in risk sharing and aggregate shocks can generate large gross capital flows.     

Liquidity, redistribution, and the welfare cost of inflation

The long-run welfare costs of inflation are studied in a micro-founded model with trading frictions and costly liquidity management. By modelling the liquidity management decision, the model endogenizes the responses of velocity, output, the degree of market segmentation, and the distribution of money. Compared to the traditional estimates based on a representative agent model, the welfare costs of inflation are significantly smaller due to distributional effects of inflation. The welfare cost of increasing inflation from 0% to 10% is 0.62% of consumption for the US economy. Furthermore, the welfare cost is generally non-linear in the inflation rate.     

Consumer deposit demand,interest rate differentials,and public welfare

Empirical estimates of the bank certificate of deposit demand schedule obtained in this study provide the basis for evaluating interest rate deregulation. A Box-Jenkins transfer function estimates bank deposit responses to intraindustry pricing changes and a sensitivity analysis shows microeconomic effects of interest rate differentials. The study concludes that 1) the public substantially subsidizes banks but banks achieve suboptimum deposit levels under thrift differential regulation, 2) removal of deposit rate regulation causes bank deposit demand schedules to shift slowly, not immediately, up with respect to interest rates, and 3) the consumer deposit demand curve is clearly interest elastic.     

Price volatility,welfare, and trading hours in asset markets

This paper studies the consequences of opening asset markets more often for the properties of asset prices and social welfare. For all reasonable parameter values, increasing trading hours lowers average asset prices, increases unconditional asset price volatility at a given point in time, and decreases unconditional asset price volatility when averaged over the period of time that includes the additional hours that markets are open. Unconditional social welfare is increased by opening markets more often, although the welfare gains are small – well below 1% of lifetime consumption. In contrast, because expanding hours of trading affects agents' information sets, the welfare effect of more trading hours conditional on information available to agents can be large and the effect can be negative.     

Vertical integration,foreclosure, and productive efficiency

We analyze the consequences of vertical integration by a monopoly producer dealing with two retailers (downstream firms) of varying efficiency via secret two‐part tariffs. When integrated with the inefficient retailer, the monopoly producer does not foreclose the rival retailer due to an output‐shifting effect. This effect can induce the integrated firm to engage in below‐cost pricing at the wholesale level, thereby rendering integration procompetitive. Output shifting arises with homogeneous and differentiated products. Moreover, we show that integration with an inefficient retailer emerges in a model with uncertainty over retailers' costs, and this merger can be procompetitive in expectation.     

Cross-asset relations,correlations and economic implications

This paper examines the interrelations and time-varying correlations for eight assets. One-year rolling correlations reveal that each of the 28 correlations exhibit both positive and negative values. Linear regressions reveal that given macroeconomic and financial variables contain predictive power for different asset return correlations. The term structure of interest rates and consumer sentiment feature as prominent predictor variables. Structural break tests and non-linear regressions indicate a cycling of correlations between high and low risk periods. In seeking to consider the economic content of the interrelations, we construct a safe and risky portfolio and show that the correlation between these portfolios can allow for improved market timing. Further, the safe and risky portfolio returns and correlation exhibit predictive power for macroeconomic conditions and may be used in a leading indicator role. The results presented here should be of interest to investors and policy-makers as well as academics wishing to examine the relations between both asset returns and financial and real markets.     

Banking competition and welfare

We develop a simple general equilibrium model in which investment in a risky technology is subject to moral hazard and banks can extract market power rents. We show that more bank competition results in lower economy-wide risk, higher social welfare, lower bank capital ratios, more efficient production plans and Pareto-ranked real allocations. Perfect competition supports a second best allocation and optimal levels of bank risk and capitalization. These results are at variance with those obtained by a large literature that has studied a similar environment in partial equilibrium, they are empirically relevant, and carry significant implications for policy guidance.     

Vertical integration,exclusive dealing,and expost cartelization

This article uncovers an unnoticed connection between exclusive contracts and vertical organization. A vertically integrated firm can use exclusive dealing to foreclose an equally efficient upstream competitor and to cartelize the downstream industry. Neither vertical integration nor exclusive dealing alone achieves these anticompetitive effects. The cartelization effect of these two practices may be limited when downstream firms are heterogeneous and supply contracts are not contingent on uncertain market conditions. The extent of cartelization also depends on the degree of downstream market concentration and on the degree to which downstream competition is localized.     

Global diversification, growth, and welfare with imperfectly integrated markets for goods

In this article we examine the effect of the imperfect mobilityof goods on international risk sharing and, through that, onthe investment in risky projects, welfare, and growth. Our mainresult is that the welfare gain from integration of financialmarkets is not greatly reduced by the presence of goods marketimperfections, modeled as a cost of transferring goods fromone country to the other. We also find that the gain is nonmonotonicwith respect to investors' risk aversion and the aggregate volatilityof output growth. The policy implication to be drawn is thatfinancial market integration is a worthwhile goal to pursueeven when full goods mobility has not been achieved.