rational panics and stock market crashes abstract this paper offers an explanation for stock market crashes which focuses on the role of rational but uninformed traders we show that uninformed traders can precipitate a price crash because as prices decline they surmise that informed traders received negative information which leads them to reduce their demand for assets and drive the price of stocks even lower the model yields several implications such as that crashes can occur even when the fundamentals are strong and that the magnitude of the crash depends on the fraction of uninformed investors and the amount of unsophisticated passive investing present in the market

when transparency improves must prices reflect fundamentals better no in the presence of speculative opportunities investors can learn about both asset fundamentals and the beliefs of other traders we show that this learning exhibits complementarity learning more along one dimension increases the value of learning about the other as a result regulatory changes may be counterproductive first increasing transparency i e making fundamental information cheaper to acquire can make prices less informative when investors respond by learning relatively more about others second public disclosures discourage private learning about fundamentals while encouraging information acquisition about others accordingly disclosing more fundamental information can decrease overall informational efficiency by decreasing price informativeness received april 20 2016 editorial decision september 30 2017 by editor itay goldstein

speculative attacks and the information role of the interest rate this paper models currency attacks as carried out by speculators who condition their actions on private signals about the state and on the market clearing interest rate besides affecting speculators payoffs this interest rate also provides an endogenous public signal for a plausible type of investment strategies the dual role of the interest rate allows the model to explain abrupt and intense speculative attacks solely via economic fundamentals without resorting to sunspot variables this result underlies a novel policy implication an official intervention in the foreign exchange market may reinforce a currency peg by influencing the precision of public information jel d82 d84 f31

self fulfilling currency crises the role of interest rates abstract we develop a stylized currency crises model with heterogeneous information among investors andendogenous determination of interest rates in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium our modelcaptures three key features of interest rates the opportunity cost of attacking the currency respondsto the investors behavior the domestic interest rate may influence the central bank s preferences fora fixed exchange rate and the domestic interest rate serves as a public signal which aggregatesprivate information about fundamentals we explore the payoff and informational channels throughwhich interest rates determine devaluation outcomes and examine the implications for equilibriumselection by global games methods our main conclusion is that multiplicity is not an artifact ofcommon knowledge in particular we show that multiplicity emerges robustly either when adevaluation is triggered by the cost of high domestic interest rates as in obstfeld 1996 or when adevaluation is triggered by the central bank s loss of foreign reserves as in obstfeld 1986 providedthat the domestic asset supply is sufficiently elastic in the interest rate and shocks to the domesticbond supply are sufficiently small christian helliwigdepartment of economicsuniversity of california los angelesbox 951477los angeles ca 90095 1477arijit mukherjiuniversity of minnesotaaleh tsyvinskidepartment of economicsharvard universitylittauer centercambridge ma 02138 3001

complementarities multiplicity and supply information if traders can obtain private information about the payoff and the supply of a stock then there can exist i complementarity in information acquisition and ii multiple equilibria in the financial and information markets the additional dimension of supply information increases coordination possibilities in the financial market leading to multiple equilibria the existence of two information sources can lead to information acquisition being complementary the multiplicity of equilibria is suggestive of excess volatility and crashes the different financial market equilibria imply differing patterns of cost of capital and volume of trade 2009 by the european economic association

foreign owned insurer performance in the us property liability markets foreign owned property liability insurers have increased their market share in the us in the recent decades they may have achieved this by being more efficient by undercutting prices to attract away business from their domestic rivals or both we investigate return risk efficiency and determinants of efficiency performance of these insurers relative to their domestic competitors we find that these firms are less profitable and less efficient in terms of cost scale and revenue x efficiencies but more efficient in terms of cost x and revenue scale efficiencies overall the evidence shows that both of the aforementioned factors have contributed to their growth

security analysis and trading patterns when some investors receive information before others in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time this article analyzes trading behavior and equilibrium information acquisition when some investors receive common private information before others the model implies that under some conditions investors will focus only on a subset of securities herding while neglecting other securities with identical exogenous characteristics in addition the model is consistent with empirical correlations that are suggestive of oft cited trading strategies such as profit taking short term position reversal and following the leader mimicking earlier trades in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time while these models provide many important insights in reality some investors either fortuitously or owing to superior skill acquire pertinent information before others by being first an investor can exploit this information to great advantage information that is uncovered only slightly later is less valuable even if it has not yet been publicly revealed we show in this article that the sequential nature of information arrival has a significant effect on both the trading decisions and the types of information collected by investors the model we develop describes the investment choices of a set of competitive risk averse investors who investigate the long term prospects of firms lucky or high ability investors uncover the

financial markets the real economy and self fulfilling uncertainties we develop a model of informational interdependence between financial markets and the real economy linking economic uncertainty to information production and aggregate economic activities in general equilibrium the mutual learning between financial markets and the real economy creates a strategic complementarity in their information production leading to self fulfilling surges in economic uncertainties in a dynamic setting our model characterizes self fulfilling uncertainty traps with two steady state equilibria and a two stage economic crisis in transitional dynamics

on the impact of fundamentals liquidity and coordination on market stability complex interactions between fundamentals and liquidity during unstable periods in financial markets are succinctly modeled with co ordination games we propose a flexible framework to estimate such a model and use the efficient method of moments as estimation proce dure we illustrate the model by using exchange rates from the yen dollar carry trade induced uncertainty in 1998 interest rate spreads and global market volatility the model fits the data well with ev idence of low information disparities the market is generally very deep where global volatility is more important than fundamental un certainty in the determination of liquidity there is clear evidence of asymmetry between the buy and sell sides of the market

should we regulate financial information regulations that require asset issuers to disclose payoff relevant information to potential buyers sound like obvious measures to increase investor welfare but in many cases such regulations harm investors in an equilibrium model asset returns compensate investors for risk by making payoffs less uncertain disclosure reduces risk and therefore reduces return as high risk high return investments disappear investor welfare falls of course information is still valuable to each individual investor but acquiring information is like a prisoners dilemma each investor is better off with the information but collectively investors are better off if they remain uninformed the only cases in which providing information improves investors welfare are ones where there would otherwise be severe asymmetric information using a model of information markets the paper explores when such outcomes are likely to arise when we extend the model so that financial markets with information allocate the real capital stock more efficiently these conclusions do not change disclosure improves efficiency but more efficient firms do not have more risk and therefore do not offer investors higher return instead they simply command a higher price which only benefits the asset issuer since the efficiency gains are fully internalized by asset issuers who can choose to disclose without disclosure being mandatory the efficiency argument is not a logical rationale for regulation

learning from prices public communication and welfare we study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks using a micro founded macroeconomic model in which agents learn from the distribution of nominal prices while a public release has the direct beneficial effect of providing new information it also has the indirect adverse effect of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system we show that the negative indirect effect can dominate thus the public information release may increase uncertainty about the monetary shock and reduce welfare we find that the optimal communication policy is always to release either all or none of the information

knowing what others know coordination motives in information acquisition we explore how optimal information choices change the predictions of strategic models when a large number of agents play a game with strategic complementarity information choices exhibit complementarity as well if an agent wants to do what others do they want to know what others know this makes heterogeneous beliefs di cult to sustain and may generate multiple equilibria in models with substitutability agents prefer to difierentiate their information choices we use these theoretical results to examine the role of information choice in recent price setting models and to propose modeling techniques that ensure equilibrium uniqueness

coordination and delay in global games abstract what is the effect of offering agents an option to delay their choices in a global coordination game we address this question by considering a canonical binary action global game and allowing players to delay their irreversible decisions those that delay have access to accurate private information at the second stage but receive lower payoffs we show that as noise vanishes as long as the benefit to taking the risky action early is greater than the benefit of taking the risky action late the introduction of the option to delay reduces the incidence of coordination failure in equilibrium relative to the standard case where all agents must choose their actions at the same time we outline the welfare implications of this finding and probe the robustness of our results from a variety of angles

insider trading outside search and resource allocation why firms and society may disagree on insider trading restrictions we show that entrepreneurs may prefer to allow insider trading even when it is not socially optimal we examine a model in which an insider manager allocates resources on the basis of his private information and outside information conveyed through the secondary market price of the firm s shares if the manager is allowed to trade he will compete with informed outsiders reducing the equilibrium quality of outside information while the benefits to production of outside information are the same for society and entrepreneurs we show that the social and private costs are different thus entrepreneurs and society may disagree on the conditions under which insider trading restrictions should be imposed article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

dynamic global games of regime change learning multiplicity and the timing of attacks global games of regime change coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attack it have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks bank runs debt crises and political change we extend the static benchmark examined in the literature by allowing agents to take actions in many periods and to learn about the underlying fundamentals over time we first provide a simple recursive algorithm for the characterization of monotone equilibria we then show how the interaction of the knowledge that the regime survived past attacks with the arrival of information over time or with changes in fundamentals leads to interesting equilibrium properties first multiplicity may obtain under the same conditions on exogenous information that guarantee uniqueness in the static benchmark second fundamentals may predict the eventual fate of the regime but not the timing or the number of attacks finally equilibrium dynamics can alternate between phases of tranquility where no attack is possible and phases of distress where a large attack can occur even without changes in fundamentals

employee bargaining power inter firm competition and equity based compensation abstract we develop a model to illustrate that equity based compensation for non executive employees and product market decisions are related when the product market is competitive and employees have low bargaining power the unique equilibrium is for each firm s owners to offer equity based compensation to their employees in this setting equity based compensation leads to a lower wage rate which makes each firm more competitive with its rival however this unique equilibrium is a prisoner s dilemma for the firms original owners our results are consistent with several empirical regularities and provide predictions on when firms will offer equity based compensation to their employees

evaluating solvency versus efficiency performance and different forms of organization and marketing in us property liability insurance companies abstract solvency is a primary concern for regulators of insurance companies claims paying ability is a primary concern for policyholders and return on investment is a primary concern for investors these interests potentially conflict and the decision makers for the firm must trade off one concern versus another here we examine the efficiency of insurance companies via data envelopment analysis using solvency claims paying ability and return on investment as outputs and using a financial intermediary model for the insurance company the effect of solvency on efficiency is then examined these efficiency evaluations are further examined to study stock versus mutual form of organizational structure and agency versus direct marketing arrangements which are examined separately and in combination

information markets and the comovement of asset prices traditional asset pricing models predict that covariance between prices of difierent assets should be lower than what we observe in the data this model generates high covariance within a rational expectations framework by introducing markets for information about asset payofis when information is costly rational investors will not buy information about all assets they will learn about a subset because information production has high flxed costs competitive producers charge more for low demand information than for high demand information a price that declines in quantity makes investors want to purchase a common subset of information if investors price many assets using a common subset of information then a shock to one signal is passed on as a common shock to many asset prices these common shocks to asset prices generate excess covariance the cross sectional and time series properties of asset price covariance are consistent with this explanation

learning and complementarities in speculative attacks we study a model where the aggregate trading of currency speculators reveals new information to the central bank and affects its policy decision we show that the learning process gives rise to coordination motives among speculators leading to large currency attacks and introducing non fundamental volatility into exchange rates and policy decisions we show that the central bank can improve the ex ante effectiveness of its policy by committing to put a lower weight ex post on the information from the market and that transparency may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of learning from the market depending on how it is implemented

the informational content of prices when policy makers react to financial markets abstract when can policy makers use policy relevant information from financial market prices and how does policy affect price informativeness i analyze a novel setting with noise where a policy maker tries to infer information about a state variable from prices to improve policy decisions and policy in turn affects asset values i derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of information revelation in equilibrium which might not be possible if the policy reaction to prices punishes traders for revealing their information if the policy maker is uninformed then policy objectives do not change price informativeness but they do if the policy maker has independent information about the state i also analyze policy maker transparency and find that policy makers with objectives having a large impact on asset values should publish their information before trading to make prices more informative in other cases intransparency can be optimal

the robustness of output measures in property liability insurance efficiency studies abstract we empirically examine two methods for measuring output in property liability insurer efficiency studies the value added approach and the flow or financial intermediation approach the approaches are not mutually consistent the value added approach is closely related to traditional measures of firm performance but the flow approach is not in addition efficient value added approach firms are less likely to go insolvent while firms characterized as efficient by the flow approach are generally more likely to fail we also find that the theoretical concern regarding the value added approach s use of losses as a measure of output is not validated empirically

efficiency in the international insurance industry a cross country comparison the purpose of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on frontier efficiency measurement in the international insurance industry a topic of great interest in the academic literature during the last several years a broad efficiency comparison of 6462 insurers from 36 countries is conducted different methodologies countries organizational forms and company sizes are compared considering life and non life insurers we find a steady technical and cost efficiency growth in international insurance markets from 2002 to 2006 with large differences across countries denmark and japan have the highest average efficiency whereas the philippines is the least efficient regarding organizational form the results are not consistent with the expense preference hypothesis which claims that mutuals should be less efficient than stocks due to higher agency costs only minor variations are found when comparing different frontier efficiency methodologies data envelopment analysis stochastic frontier analysis

expectations and contagion in self fulfilling currency attacks this paper shows how expectations driven contagion of currency crises can arise even if the currency market has a unique equilibrium when viewed in isolation the model of morris and shin 1998 is extended to allow speculators to trade in a second currency market if speculators believe that a devaluation of this other currency will make a domestic devaluation more likely they will engage in trades that link the two markets a sharp devaluation of the other currency will then be propagated to the domestic market and will increase the likelihood of ac risis there fulfilling the original expectations even though this contagion is driven solely by expectations the model places restrictions on observable variables and these restrictions are broadly consistent with existing empirical evidence

the real effects of short selling constraints we use a regulatory experiment regulation sho that relaxes short selling constraints on a random sample of u s stocks to test whether capital market frictions have an effect on stock prices and corporate decisions we find that an increase in short selling activity causes prices to fall and that small firms react to these lower prices by reducing equity issues and investment these results not only provide evidence that short selling constraints affect asset prices but also confirm that short selling activity has a causal impact on financing and investment decisions

gunboats reputation and sovereign repayment lessons from the southern confederacy abstract many states that formed the southern confederacy defaulted on sovereign debt sold in international capital markets during the 1840s the confederacy also elected president jefferson davis who openly advocated the repudiation of u s states debts while a member of congress despite its poor credit record the confederate government managed to float cotton bonds in england that constituted under 2 of its expenditures the bonds were largely issued to settle overdue debts with gun contractors who had cut off trade credit the south serviced the bonds as late as march 1865 a time of domestic hyperinflation and weeks before the fall of richmond although the confederate experience shows that trade sanctions can promote debt repayment the gunboat model can only account for a small amount of lending a reputation or another type of sanction would be necessary to support higher levels of lending in international capital markets

financial system architecture this article builds a theory of financial system architecture we ask what is a financial market what is a bank and what determines the economic role of each starting with basic assumptions about primitives the types of agents and the nature of the informational asymmetries we provide a theory that explains which agents coalesce to form banks and which trade in the capital market it is shown that borrowers of higher observable qualities access the financial market moreover a financial system in its infancy will be bank dominated and increased financial market sophistication diminishes bank lending article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

desperation votes and private interests an analysis of confederate trade legislation the confederate congress passed draconian trade legislation in february 1864 to regulate the blockade running business in contrast to their free trade agenda this legislation created higher prices and deadweight costs except in areas under union control we examine the series of votes and proposed amendments relating to the passage of this legislation and find that representatives were more likely to vote for trade regulations if their districts would be largely unaffected by the legislation such as those districts under union occupation this private interest explanation provides a heretofore unexplored historical example of public choice theory under extreme conditions

informational feedback adverse selection and optimal disclosure policy faceless trading in a secondary stock market not only redistributes wealth among investors but also generates information that feeds back to real decisions using this observation we re evaluate the leveling the playing field rationale for disclosure to secondary stock markets by partially preempting traders information advantage established from information acquisition disclosure reduces private incentives to acquire information resulting in two opposite effects on firm value on one hand this narrows the information gap between informed and uninformed traders and improves liquidity of firm shares on the other hand this reduces the informational feedback from the stock market to real decisions this tradeoff determines the optimal disclosure policy the model explains why firm value can be higher in an environment that simultaneously promotes disclosure and private information production and why growth firms are endogenously more opaque than value firms

speculative attacks with multiple sources of public information we propose a speculative attack model in which agents receive multiple public signals it is characterised by its focus on an informational structure which sets free from the strict separation between public information and private information diverse pieces of public information can be taken into account differently by players and are likely to lead to different appreciations ex post this process defines players private value the main result is to show that equilibrium uniqueness depends on two conditions i signals are sufficiently dispersed ii private beliefs about the relative precision of these signals sufficiently differ we derive some implications for information dissemination policy transparency in this context is multi dimensional it concerns the publicity of announcements the number of signals disclosed as well as their precision especially it seems that the central bank has better not publishing its forecast errors in order to maintain stability an illustration to our analysis is the recent debate concerning the optimal monetary policy committee structure of central banks

trading frenzies and their impact on real investment we study a model in which a capital provider learns from the price of a firm s security in deciding how much capital to provide for new investment this feedback effect from the financial market to the investment decision gives rise to trading frenzies in which speculators all wish to trade like others generating large pressure on prices coordination among speculators is sometimes desirable for price informativeness and investment efficiency but speculators incentives push in the opposite direction so that they coordinate exactly when it is undesirable we analyze the effect of various market parameters on the likelihood of trading frenzies to arise

public information private information and the multiplicity of equilibria in coordination games abstract i study coordination games with incomplete public and private information and relate equilibrium convergence to convergence of higher order beliefs as the players signals become more and more precise the equilibrium manifold converges to the correspondence of common knowledge equilibria whenever the variance of the public signal converges to 0 at a rate faster than one half the rate of convergence of the variance of private signals the same condition also determines the convergence of common p belief to common knowledge which leads to a simple intuition for its origin and an immediate generalization of the former results about equilibrium convergence journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d82

was v for victory or votes a public choice analysis of world war ii federal spending several studies on the new deal have found that politicalfactors played a significant role in determining 1930s federalspending this suggests that federal spending was not capturedby special interest groups and self interested politiciansrecently but rather that it has been affected by thesefactors since the era of big government began we examinethe military emergency of the 1940s to determine whetherfederal spending during this crisis was similarly affected bypolitics

organization and efficiency in the international insurance industry a cross frontier analysis abstract this paper employs cross frontier analysis an innovative tool based on data envelopment analysis to provide new insight into the relationship between organization and efficiency in international insurance markets we are the first to empirically test the expense preference hypothesis and the efficient structure hypothesis in a large cross country study for this purpose we consider 23 807 firm years for 21 countries from northern america and the european union a dataset not previously analyzed in this context we find evidence for the efficient structure hypothesis in selected market segments but we find no evidence for the expense preference hypothesis our results provide insight into the competitiveness of stock and mutual insurers from different countries at the country level the results can be used to compare different insurance markets our findings are especially interesting for the strategic management of insurance companies as well as for regulators and boards of national insurance associations

the going public decision and the development of financial markets this paper explores the linkages between stock price efficiency the choice between private and public financing and the development of capital markets in emerging economies generally the advantage of public financing is high if costly information is diverse and cheap to acquire and if investors receive valuable information without cost the value of public firms generally depends on public market size which implies that there can be a positive externality associated with going public so that an inferior equilibrium can exist where too few firms go public the model is consistent with empirical observations on financial market development

voting on slavery at the constitutional convention this paper provides the first empirical study of delegate voting behavior on issues of slavery at the u s constitutional convention we analyze two categories of votes those related to apportionment and those related to the regulation of the slave trade although it is widely believed that delegates voted consistent with the interests of their states on issues of slavery we find that for votes on apportionment the effect of state interests was enhanced by both the delegate s personal interest and his religious background for votes regulating the slave trade state interests had a significant effect but only within specific regions

signaling in a global game coordination and policy traps this paper introduces signaling in a global game so as to examine the informational role of policy in coordination environments such as currency crises and bank runs while exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium we show that the endogenous information generated by policy interventions leads to multiple equilibria the policy maker is thus trapped into a position in which self fulfilling expectations dictate not only the coordination outcome but also the optimal policy this result does not rely on the freedom to choose out of equilibrium beliefs nor on the policy being a public signal it may obtain even if the policy is observed with idiosyncratic noise

the source of information in prices and investment price sensitivity abstract this paper shows that real decisions depend not only on the total amount of information in prices but the source of this information a manager learns from prices when they contain information not possessed by him we use the staggered enforcement of insider trading laws across 27 countries as a shock to the source of information that leaves total information unchanged enforcement reduces increases managers outsiders contribution to the stock price consistent with the predictions of our theoretical model enforcement increases investment q sensitivity even when controlling for total price informativeness the effect is larger in industries where learning is likely to be stronger and in emerging countries where outsider information acquisition rises most post enforcement enforcement does not increase the sensitivity of investment to cash flow a non price measure of investment opportunities these findings suggest that extant measures of price efficiency should be rethought when evaluating real efficiency more broadly our paper provides causal evidence that managers learn from prices by using a shock to price informativeness

an efficiency comparison of the non life insurance industry in the bric countries abstract we analyze the efficiency of non life insurance companies in four of the fastest growing markets in the world the bric brazil russia india china countries an innovative feature of this paper is its incorporation of uncontrollable variables in the efficiency analysis using multi stage data envelopment analysis dea this approach captures cross country differences such as the political and economic environment and allows distinguishing between managerial inefficiency and inefficiency due to environmental conditions we find that the environment affects the efficiency of non life insurers operating in the bric countries furthermore in a regression of firm characteristics on efficiency scores we identify four drives of efficiency size profitability solvency and ownership form the results further our understanding of the insurance industry in the bric countries in regard to its efficiency and the environment in which it operates

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

good disclosure bad disclosure we study the implications of public information in a model where market prices convey information to relevant decision makers and the uctuation of market prices is driven by multiple factors disclosure has a positive direct eect of providing new information and an indirect eect of changing the price informativeness if disclosure is about a variable of which real decision makers are well informed then the indirect eect is also positive so that the direct eect is ampli ed leading to a positive overall eect on real e ciency if disclosure is about a variable that real decision markers care to learn much then the indirect eect is negative and the direct eect is attenuated moreover in markets which aggregate private information eectively the negative indirect eect can dominate so that disclosure can harm real e ciency

the social cost of near rational investment abstract we show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically red

market based corrective actions many economic agents take corrective actions based on information inferred from market prices of firms securities examples include directors and activists intervening in the management of firms and bank supervisors taking actions to improve the health of financial institutions we provide an equilibrium analysis of such situations in light of a key problem if agents use market prices when deciding on corrective actions prices adjust to reflect this use and potentially become less revealing we show that market information and agents information are complementary and discuss measures that can increase agents ability to learn from market prices the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please email journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

manipulation and the allocational role of prices it is commonly believed that prices in secondary financial markets play an important allocational role because they contain information that facilitates the efficient allocation of resources this paper identifies a limitation inherent in this role of prices it shows that the presence of a feedback effect from the financial market to the real value of a firm creates an incentive for an uninformed trader to sell the firm s stock when this happens the informativeness of the stock price decreases and the beneficial allocational role of the financial market weakens the trader profits from this trading strategy partly because his trading distorts the firm s investment we therefore refer to this strategy as manipulation we show that trading without information is profitable only with sell orders driving a wedge between the allocational implications of buyer and seller initiated speculation and providing justification for restrictions on short sales

posturing and holdup in innovation we show that the need to posture can help solve the holdup problem inherent in many multistage relationships including those between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists posturing arises when an informed party needs to send a strong signal to induce skeptical third parties like employees suppliers customers or competitors to develop maintain relationships with the firm or take other actions that increase firm value in the venture capital context this can be credibly achieved if the vc publicly invests at high prices in later rounds this tempers holdup by shifting ex post bargaining power toward the entrepreneur inducing him to exert greater effort

feedback effects and asset prices feedback effects from asset prices to firm cash flows have been empirically documented this finding raises a question for asset pricing how are asset prices determined if price affects fundamental value which in turn affects price in this environment by buying assets that others are buying investors ensure high future cash flows for the firm and subsequent high returns for themselves hence investors have an incentive to coordinate which may generate self fulfilling beliefs and multiple equilibria using insights from global games we pin down investors beliefs analyze equilibrium prices and show that strong feedback leads to higher excess volatility

social value of public information comment morris and shin 2002 is actually pro transparency not con the main result of morris and shin 2002 restated in papers by amato morris and shin 2002 and amato and shin 2003 and commented upon by the economist 2004 has been presented and interpreted as an anti transparency result more public information can be bad however some scrutiny of the result shows that it is actually pro transparency except in very special circumstances more public information is good furthermore for a conservative benchmark of equal precision in public and privateinformation social welfare is higher than in as ituation without public information

information production dilution costs and optimal security design abstract we investigate the problem of a firm wishing to finance a project by issuing securities under asymmetric information we find that when outside investors can produce noisy information on the firm s quality the degree of information asymmetry resulting in equilibrium is endogenous and depends on the information sensitivity of the security issued thus in contrast to the prediction of the pecking order theory see e g myers and majluf j financial econom 13 1984 187 a security with low sensitivity to private information such as debt does not always dominate one with high information sensitivity such as equity a firm s preference for equity rather than debt depends on the costs of information production the precision of the information production technology and the extent of the information asymmetry we also study the optimal security design problem and find that depending on the cost and precision of the information production technology risky debt or a composite security with a convex payoff emerges as optimal securities

informational frictions and commodity markets this paper develops a model with a tractable log linear equilibrium to analyze the effects of informational frictions in commodity markets by aggregating dispersed information about the strength of the global economy among goods producers whose production has complementarity commodity prices serve as price signals to guide producers production decisions and commodity demand our model highlights important feedback effects of informational noise originating from supply shocks and futures market trading on commodity demand and spot prices our analysis illustrates the weakness common in empirical studies on commodity markets of assuming that different types of shocks are publicly observable to market participants

ideology economic interests and congressional roll call voting partisan instability and bank of the united states legislation 1811 1816 we introduce a wrinkle into the study of congressional roll call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in american history the era of good feelings during deviations from normal periods of two party rule the dominant model of voting behavior the ideological model loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes we contend that a pooled voting model comprised of both ideological and economic variables performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods when party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions we believe the electoral connection is especially important and thus economic based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice to explore this belief we focus on a particularly contentious issue the rechartering of the bank of the united states bus which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the house using measures developed by poole and rosenthal 1985 1997 we find that the vote on the first bus in 1811 during a stable partisan period is organized along ideological lines by 1816 the two party system collapsed and we do not find the vote on the second bus to exhibit much ideological structure conversely we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the second bus quite well providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification