Uncertainty in an Interconnected Financial System,Contagion, and Market Freezes

This paper studies contagion and market freezes caused by uncertainty in financial network structures. Our model demonstrates that in a financial system where financial institutions are interconnected, a negative shock to an individual financial institution could spread to other institutions, causing market freezes because of creditors' uncertainty about the financial network structure. Our model also reveals that when both a large creditor and a continuum of small creditors are present, the size of the large creditor will affect the severity of market freezes substantially. Moreover, our model is used to examine central bank policies to alleviate market freezes.     

The Ohio Banking Crisis: A Lesson in Consumer Finance

This paper reports the results of a survey taken on April 14, 1985, at a meeting of the depositors in Home State Savings Bank, the Cincinnati-based savings and loan association that had closed in early March because of losses suffered in government securities transactions. The results for the 578 depositors surveyed show a high percentage of depositors over 55 years of age and retired, with a high school education or less. Although the majority of those surveyed are low- to middle-income consumers, over 50 percent have more than $20,000 on deposit in Home State Savings Bank, which, for most of them, represents over 50 percent of their total savings. A large number of depositors also appear to have limited or incorrect information about Home State's deposit insurance and financial condition.     

The Effect of Credit Ratings on Disclosure: Evidence from the Recalibration of Moody's Municipal Ratings

This paper examines how credit rating levels affect municipal debt issuers’ disclosure decisions. Using exogenous upgrades in credit rating levels caused by the recalibration of Moody's municipal ratings scale in 2010, we find that upgraded municipalities significantly reduce their disclosure of required continuing financial information, relative to unaffected municipalities. Consistent with a reduction in debtholders’ demand for information driving these results, the reduction in disclosure is greater when municipal bonds are held by investors who relied more on disclosure ex ante. However, we also find that the reduction in disclosure does not manifest when issuers are monitored by underwriters with greater issuer-specific expertise and when issuers are subject to direct regulatory enforcement through the receipt of federal funding. Overall, our results suggest that higher credit rating levels lower investor demand for disclosure in the municipal market, and highlight the role of underwriters and direct regulatory enforcement in maintaining disclosure levels when investor demand is low.     

ARE ATHLETES DOPED? SOME THEORETICAL ARGUMENTS AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Sports fans all over the world have recently witnessed an increasing number of spectacular doping cases, leading to considerable annoyance in the public. However, our knowledge regarding the prevalence of doping is still quite limited, leading some people to speculate that (nearly) all professional athletes are doped and possibly even have to be doped to be good enough to compete successfully in highly selective tournaments. On the other hand, particularly representatives of the sports associations pretend that since the number of positively tested athletes remains small, there are only a few "black sheep," while in general, the world of sport is clean and fair. In the recent past, a number of theoretical models have been developed that can be empirically tested, which, in the end, may lead to the formulation of policy recommendations (ranging from higher sanctions to legalizing doping). We review the more important models and present anecdotal as well as some quantitative empirical evidence on the prevalence as well as the determinants of doping. ( JEL K42, L83, M52)     

On the Value of Transparency in Agencies with Renegotiation

In this paper we study when it is advantageous to improve corporate transparency by allowing shareholders direct access to corporate information and when it is preferable to rely on a reporting system in which shareholders only gain access to information that management chooses to disclose. We show that in an agency model that allows for contract renegotiation, the desirability of a fully transparent reporting regime hinges on the stewardship properties of the information in question. Specifically, information that is mainly useful for predicting future events and of little use for evaluating past actions should only be made available to the public through management's self‐interested disclosures. Only if the information is useful for making inference about managerial actions can it be optimal to have full corporate transparency, so that outsiders have independent access to the same information as management.     

YOUTH ALCOHOL USE AND PUBLIC POLICY

This paper examines the frequencies of youth drinking and heavy drinking in 1982 and 1989 and separately examines the effects of minimum legal drinking ages and beer excise taxes for each year. In both years, drinking is responsive to price changes resulting from higher excise taxes. However, the price sensitivity of youth alcohol use fell after states changed to a uniform minimum legal drinking age of 21 .     

Budget Balancedness and Optimal Income Taxation

We make two contributions to the theory of optimal income taxation. First, assuming conditions sufficient for existence of a Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism, we show that if agents' preferences satisfy an extended notion of single crossing called capacity constrained single crossing, then there exists a Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism that is budget balancing. Second, we show that, even without capacity constrained single crossing, existence of a budget balancing Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism is guaranteed if the set of agent types contains no atoms.