Market Discipline, Information Processing, and Corporate Governance

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of “market discipline” in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis. Discipline that is provided by the “market” must be compared to discipline that is provided by other institutions, e.g., intermediaries acting as “delegated monitors”. The comparative assessment depends on (i) the information technology, (ii) the role of strategic interactions, and (iii) the disciplinary mechanism itself. Concerning (i), the question is whether the benefits of multiple sources of information exceed the costs. Concerning (ii), strategic interactions concern the free-rider problem in acquiring information that benefits all financiers, as well as distributive externalities involved in exploiting an information advantage to the detriment of other financiers. Concerning (iii), the question is whether investors have explicit intervention rights or whether “discipline” results from managerial acquiescence. As for the acquisition and aggregation of information in organized markets, positive welfare effects arise only if the information is put to productive use, either through improvements in real investment and managerial incentives, or through changes in corporate control. Necessary conditions for such benefits to arise are fairly restrictive, especially if the changes that occur are based on managerial acquiescence rather than the legal intervention rights of investors. The expansion of market-based managerial incentives in the nineties had little to do with these theoretical accounts. The experience of moral hazard that has accompanied this expansion, on the side of gate-keeping institutions as well as corporate management, confirms the predictions of theory about the potential for shortfalls in market discipline and the agency costs of equity finance through the open market

Risk Aversion in the Small and in the Large When Outcomes Are Multidimensional

The paper discusses criteria for comparing risk aversion of decision makers when outcomes are multidimensional. A weak concept, �commodity specific greater risk aversion�, is based on the comparison of risk premia paid in a specified commodity. A stronger concept, �uniformly greater risk aversion� is based on the comparison of risk premia regardless of what commodities are used for payment. Neither concept presumes that von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions are ordinally equivalent. Nonincreasing consumption specific risk aversion is shown to be sufficient to make randomization undesirable in an agency problem with hidden characteristics.

Risk Aversion in the Small and in the Large. When Outcomes are Multidimensional

The paper discusses criteria for comparing risk aversion of decision makers when outcomes are multidimensional. A weak concept, ”commodity specific greater risk aversion”, is based on the comparison of risk premia paid in a specified commodity. A stronger concept, ”uniformly greater risk aversion” is based on the comparison of risk premia regardless of what commodities are used for payment. Neither concept presumes that von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions are ordinally equivalent. Nonincreasing consumption specific risk aversion is shown to be sufficient to make randomization undesirable in an agency problem with hidden characteristics.Multidimensional Risks, Risk Aversion, Risk Premia, Randomization in Incentive Schemes

Switzerland and Euroland: European Monetary Union, Monetary Stability and Financial Stability

This contribution to the Festschrift for the Centenary of the Swiss National Bank discusses the prospects for monetary stability and financial stability after the creation of the European Monetary Union. Topics covered include the robustness of institutional arrangements and their implications for monetary stability, the implications for a small, nonparticipating country, and the problem of financial stability in a setting in which banking supervision is national and the lender of the last resort is supranational.European Monetary Union, European Central Bank, Monetary Stability, Banking Supervision, Financial Crisis Management

Incentive Problems with Unidimensional Hidden Characteristics: A Unified Approach

The paper develops a technique for studying incentive problems with unidimensional hidden characteristics in a way that is independent of whether the type set is nite, the type distribution has a continuous density, or the type distribution has both mass points and an atomless part. By this technique, the proposition that optimal incentive schemes induce no distortion "at the top" and downward distortions "below the top" is extended to arbitrary type distributions. However, mass points in the interior of the type set require pooling with adjacent higher types and, unless there are other complications, a discontinuous jump in the transition from adjacent lower types.Hidden Characteristics, Incentive Problems, Principal-Agent Models, General Type Distributions

Optimal Income Taxation, Public-Goods Provision and Public-Sector Pricing: A Contribution to the Foundations of Public Economics

The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring renegotiation proofness of the final allocation of private goods and admission tickets for excludable public goods. Under an affiliation assumption on the underlying distribution, optimal income taxation, public-goods provision and admission fees have the same qualitative properties as in unidimensional models. These properties are obtained for utilitarian welfare maximization and for a Ramsey-Boiteux formulation with interim participation constraints.Optimal Income Taxation, Public Goods, Public-Sector Pricing, Multidimensional Mechanism Design, Ramsey-Boiteux Pricing

From Posteriors to Priors via Cycles: An Addendum

Rodrigues-Neto (2009) has shown that a given specification of posteriors of different players in an incomplete-information setting is compatible with a common prior if and only if the posteriors satisfy the so-called cycle equations. This note shows that, if, for any player, any element of the partition of the this player has a nonempty intersection with any element of the partition of any other player, then it suffices to verify the cycle equations for all cycles of length 4 or less.Belief systems, consistency, common priors, cycle equations

Incomplete-Information Models of Large Economies with Anonymity: Existence and Uniqueness of Common Priors

The paper provides a speci?cation of belief systems for models of large economies with anonymity in which aggregate states depend only on cross-section distributions of types. For belief systems satisfying certain conditions of mutual absolute continuity, the paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a common prior. Under the given conditions, the common prior is unique.Large Economy, Belief systems, consistency, common prior

Corporate Governance and the Financing of Investment for Structural Change

The paper puts forward the proposition that large corporations should be treated as financial institutions in their own right, as they use available earning from some activities to finance others, including new developments. With this view, it is suggested that the role of the financial system may be seen as channelling funds from activities earning cash to activities needing cash (rather than channelling fund from households to firms). Starting from a critical assessment of the literature on agency costs of internal finance, the paper discusses the pros and cons of having new activities financed within given corporate shells, with significant management autonomy; this is compared to a system where earnings are distributed and - at least partly - reinvested through organized markets. The political economy of decision making within existing corporate shells is identified as a major source of bias in decisions.