Incentives for information production in markets where prices affect real investment

We analyze information production incentives for traders in financial markets, when firms condition investment decisions on information revealed through stock prices. We show that traders’ private value of information about a firm’s investment project increases with the ex ante likelihood the project will be undertaken. This generates an informational amplification effect of shocks to firm value. Information production by traders may exhibit strategic complementarities for projects that would not be undertaken in the absence of positive news from the stock market. A small decline in fundamentals can lead to a market breakdown where information production ceases, and investment and firm value collapse. Our theory sheds light on how productivity shocks are amplified over the business cycle

Myopic traders, efficiency and taxation

This paper explores the welfare implications of a securities transaction tax when informed traders act under short-term objectives. The model presented features speculators who can trade on information of differing time horizons, trade by fully rational uninformed agents, endogenous asset prices and profit maximising firms that can use information contained in stock prices to improve their investment decision. The only value enhancing investment available to firms requires a long-term investment. Therefore investment efficiency can only be improved if stock prices contain long-term information. It is shown that when informed traders act under short-term objectives, a subsidy on short-term trade can improve welfare. This is because trade by short-term informed speculators exerts a positive externality over the profitability of long-term informed trade. A subsidy on short-term trade thus increases the amount of trade on long-term information in equilibrium. As a result stock prices contain more long-term information, which improves investment efficiency. The model takes full account of the effect of a tax on market liquidity and welfare for all market participants

Trading on short-term information

In this paper we address the question as to why fund managers may trade on short-term information in a financial market that offers more profitable trading on long-term information. We consider a setting in which a fund manager's ability is unknown and an investor uses performance observations to learn about this ability. We show that an investor learns less efficiently about the ability of a fund manager when he trades on long-term information compared to trading on short-term information. This is the case, because the information on which a manager bases his trades is less precise the longer the information horizon, and thus performance observations contain more noise. Moreover, under trading on long-term information, performance observations become available after a short period only if the manager unwinds his position early. Such performance observations, however, are generally contaminated with additional noise, because unwinding prices only reveal underlying asset value imperfectly. When the informational efficiency of short-term prices increases, this effect becomes less pronounced, because a long-term trader who unwinds his position after a short time can convey an increasing amount of information concerning his ability to the investor. At the same time, trading on short-term information becomes less profitable, and therefore the investor's incentive to induce short-term trading weakened. Nevertheless, we show that short-term trading may be induced even when prices fully reveal short-term information

Emerging markets and entry by actively managed funds

This paper investigates the incentives of investors to set up an actively managed fund in an emerging market or asset class. The analysis highlights the role of agency problems between fund managers and investors in determining this entry decision. It is shown that investors may wish to set up a fund in a new market, only when another fund is also active in that market. Fund entry into a new market can therefore be subject to a co-ordination problem, which may result in no entry of funds. This problem is acute when fund managers have little information about underlying asset values. Equilibrium wage contracts for managers are derived for the case when one or two managers are active in a market. It is shown that wage contracts induce (i) overly aggressive trading by managers when two funds are active in a market, and (ii) insufficiently aggressive trading when only one manager is active. The evidence of country fund inception for emerging markets is reviewed in light of this analysis and policy implications are presented

The pecking order of segmentation and liquidity-injection policies in a model of contagious crises

We study a two-country setting in which leveraged investors generate fire-sale externalities, leading to financial crises and contagion. Governments can affect the incidence of financial crisis and the degree of contagion by injecting public liquidity and, additionally, by segmenting the countries’ liquidity markets. We show that segmentation allows a country to avoid contagion and fend off mild financial crises caused by a small shock to its liquidity demand, at the cost of exposing it to more severe financial crises caused by a large shock. We derive a “pecking order” result, whereby segmentation is a second-best measure that coordinated governments should use only when tax capacity constrains them from injecting liquidity. Even when segmentation is welfare-enhancing, it should be applied to public liquidity alone, never restricting the free flow of private liquidity across countries. Uncoordinated governments tend to use segmentation excessively

Good cop, bad cop: complementarities between debt and equity in disciplining management

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm's cash flow into a "safe" claim (debt) and a "risky" claim (equity). The former, being relatively insensitive to upside risk, provides a commitment to shut down the firm in the absence of good news. This commitment provides the latter a greater incentive to collect information than a monitor holding the aggregate claim would have. Thus debt and equity are shown to be complementary instruments in firm finance. We show that stock markets can play a useful role in transmitting information from equity to debt holders. This provides a novel argument as to why information contained in stock prices affects the real value of a corporation. It also allows us to make empirical predictions regarding the relation between shareholder dispersion, market liquidity and capital structure

Manipulation, the allocational role of prices and production externalities

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is negative among contemporaneous offerings subject to a common valuation factor. Our findings are consistent with investment banks implicitly bundling offerings subject to a common valuation factor to achieve more equitable internalization of information production costs and thereby preventing coordination failures in primary equity markets

Commitment to overinvest and price informativeness

A fundamental role of ficial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions in the real sector. In this paper we study the incentives for informaton production when prices perform this allocational role. We argue that firms' overinvestment is sometimes necessary to induce speculators in ficial markets to produce information. If firms always cancel planned investments following poor stock market response, the value of their shares will become insensitive to information on investment opportuntieis, so that speculators will be deterred from producing information. We discuss several commitment devices firms can use to facilitate information production. We show that the mechanism studied in the paper amplifies shocks to fundamentals across stages of the business cycle

Incentives for information production in markets where prices affect real investment

We analyze the incentives for ficial market traders to produce information about a firm’s investment opportunities, where such information may be noisily revealed in stock prices and thereby improve a firm’s resource allocation decisions. We show that incentives to produce costly information are sensitive to the ex ante likelihood with which an investment is undertaken by a firm. The more likely a firm is not to invest, the more likely it becomes that the traders’ information will have no speculative value. This generates an informational amplification effect of shocks to firm value. We show that information production by traders may exhibit strategic complementarities when projects would not be undertaken in the absence of positive news from the stock market. In these circumstances a small decline in a firm’s fundamentals can lead to a market breakdown where information production stops and there is a collapse in investment and firm value