Anticompetitive Effects of Common Ownership

Many natural competitors are jointly held by a small set of large institutional investors. In the U.S. airline industry, taking common ownership into account implies increases in market concentration that are 10 times larger than what is “presumed likely to enhance market power” by antitrust authorities. 1 Within‐route changes in common ownership concentration robustly correlate with route‐level changes in ticket prices, even when we only use variation in ownership due to the combination of two large asset managers. We conclude that a hidden social cost—reduced product market competition—accompanies the private benefits of diversification and good governance.     

Ambiguity, Information Quality, and Asset Pricing

When ambiguity‐averse investors process news of uncertain quality, they act as if they take a worst‐case assessment of quality. As a result, they react more strongly to bad news than to good news. They also dislike assets for which information quality is poor, especially when the underlying fundamentals are volatile. These effects induce ambiguity premia that depend on idiosyncratic risk in fundamentals as well as skewness in returns. Moreover, shocks to information quality can have persistent negative effects on prices even if fundamentals do not change.     

ENTRY AND COMPETITION IN LOCAL HOSPITAL MARKETS*

We extend the entry model developed by Bresnahan and Reiss to make use of quantity information, and apply it to data on the U.S. hospital industry. The Bresnahan and Reiss model infers changes in the toughness of competition from entry threshold ratios. Entry threshold ratios, however, identify the product of changes in the toughness of competition and changes in fixed costs. By using quantity data, we are able to identify separately changes in the toughness of competition from changes in fixed costs. This model is generally applicable to industries where there are good data on market structure and quantity, but not on prices, as for example in the quinquennial U.S. Economic Census. In the hospital markets we examine, entry leads to a quick convergence to competitive conduct. Entry reduces variable profits and increases quantity. Most of the effects of entry come from having a second and a third firm enter the market.     

Charter Schools and Urban Regimes in Neoliberal Context: Making Workers and New Spaces in Metropolitan Atlanta

In this article, we demonstrate the neoliberalism and multiscalar economic perspective of the charter school movement in Atlanta, Georgia, through examination of news articles and editorials about charter schools in the Atlanta Journal‐Constitution from 1998 to 2004. We posit three interrelated dynamics which explain the editorial board’s interest in charter schools as part of a broader urban regime agenda. First, charter schools represent part of a neoliberal shift in education that parallels shifts in urban governance, emphasizing flexibility, public–private partnerships, and ‘market’‐oriented consumer choice and accountability. Second, the newspaper is issuing a challenge to educational structures, to adopt more neoliberal policies and shed a bureaucratic, liberal governance framework. Finally, we find critical evidence that the charter school movement draws on a multiscalar discourse which simultaneously references responsiveness to local, neighborhood needs, and at the same time highlights the economic imperatives of a global, competitive city to differentially skill students/workers in order to capture mobile and fractured (global) capital.     

Incentivizing Calculated Risk‐Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers

We conduct an experiment with commercial bank loan officers to test how performance compensation affects risk assessment and lending. High‐powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending decisions. This effect is muted, however, by deferred compensation and limited liability, two standard features of loan officer compensation contracts. We find that career concerns and personality traits affect loan officer behavior, but show that the response to incentives does not vary with traits such as risk‐aversion, optimism, or overconfidence. Finally, we present evidence that incentives distort the assessment of credit risk, even among professionals with many years of experience.     

Rediscounting under Aggregate Risk with Moral Hazard

Freeman (1999) proposes a model in which discount window lending and open‐market operations have different effects. This is important because in most of the literature these policies are indistinguishable. However, Freeman's argument that the central bank should absorb losses associated with default to provide risk sharing stands in stark contrast to the concern that central banks should limit their exposure to credit risk. We extend Freeman's model by introducing moral hazard. With moral hazard, the central bank should avoid absorbing losses and Freeman's argument breaks down. However, we show that policies resembling discount window lending and open‐market operations can still be distinguished in this new framework. The optimal policy is for the central bank to make a restricted number of creditors compete for funds. By restricting the number of agents, the central bank can limit the moral hazard problem. By making them compete with each other, the central bank can exploit market information that reveals the state of the economy.     

Bank Funding,Securitization, and Loan Terms: Evidence from Foreign Currency Lending

We examine how bank funding structure and securitization activities affect the currency denomination of business loans. We analyze a unique data set that includes information on the requested and granted loan currency for 99,490 loans granted to 57,464 firms by a Bulgarian bank. Our findings document that foreign currency lending is at least partially driven by bank eagerness to match the currency structure of assets with that of liabilities. Our results also show that loan currency, as well as loan amount and maturity, are adjusted to make loans eligible for securitization.