This paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. It presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary. Diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs, even in a risk neutral economy. The paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems. In the environment assumed in the model, debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal. The analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries.

/pdf/financial-intermediation-and-delegated-monitoring-3u3herhy0i.pdf

Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring

The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

This paper shows that revealing public information to reduce information asymmetry can reduce a firm's cost of capital by attracting increased demand from large investors due to increased liquidity of its securities. Large firms will disclose more information since they benefit most. Disclosure also reduces the risk bearing capacity available through market makers. If initial information asymmetry is large, reducing it will increase the current price of the security. However, the maximum current price occurs with some asymmetry of information: further reduction of information asymmetry accentuates the undesirable effects of exit from market making. THIS PAPER STUDIES THE causes and consequences of a security's liquidity, especially the effect of future liquidity on the security's current price-equivalently the effect on its required expected rate of return, its cost of capital. Under conditions that we identify, reducing information asymmetry reduces the cost of capital. Under other (less typical) conditions, this reduced information asymmetry can have the opposite effect. We use public disclosure of information as the means of changing information asymmetry, but the points are more general. Our model is related to those of Kyle (1985), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), and Admati and Pfleiderer (1988). They assume that there is unlimited risk bearing capacity devoted to market making, which implies that changes in future liquidity never influence a security's cost of capital.1 In contrast, we develop a model of trade in an illiquid market with limited risk bearing capacity of risk-averse market makers and examine the effects of private information on the incentives of market makers to provide risk bearing

Disclosure, Liquidity, and the Cost of Capital

This paper surveys the economic literature on boards of directors. Although a legal requirement for many organizations, boards are also an endogenously determined governance mechanism for addressing agency problems inherent to many organizations. Formal theory on boards of directors has been quite limited to this point. Most empirical work on boards has been aimed at answering one of three questions: 1) How are board characteristics such as composition or size related to profitability? 2) How do board characteristics affect the observable actions of the board? 3) What factors affect the makeup of boards and how they evolve over time? The primary findings from the empirical literature on boards are: Board composition is not related to corporate performance, while board size has a negative relation to corporate performance. Both board composition and size are correlated with the board's decisions regarding CEO replacement, acquisitions, poison pills, and executive compensation. Finally, boards appear to evolve over time as a function of the bargaining power of the CEO relative to the existing directors. Firm performance, CEO turnover, and changes in ownership structure appear to be important factors affecting changes to boards.

Boards of Directors as an Endogenously Determined Institution: A Survey of the Economic Literature

This article examines the economics of financing small business in private equity and debt markets. Firms are viewed through a financial growth cycle paradigm in which different capital structures are optimal at different points in the cycle. We show the sources of small business finance, and how capital structure varies with firm size and age. The interconnectedness of small firm finance is discussed along with the impact of the macroeconomic environment. We also analyze a number of research and policy issues, review the literature, and suggest topics for future research.

/pdf/the-economics-of-small-business-finance-the-roles-of-private-3udpq27n5a.pdf

The economics of small business finance: The roles of private equity and debt markets in the financial growth cycle

How will banks evolve as competition increases from other banks and from the capital market? Will banks become more like capital market underwriters and offer passive transaction loans or return to their roots as relationship lending experts? These are the questions we address. Our key result is that as interbank competition increases, banks make more relationship loans, but each has lower added value for borrowers. Capital market competition reduces relationship lending ~and bank lending shrinks!, but each relationship loan has greater added value for borrowers. In both cases, welfare increases for some borrowers but not necessarily for all. RAPID CHANGES IN F INANCIAL SERVICES ARE threatening commercial banks. In the United States, mutual funds such as Fidelity and Merrill Lynch compete for banks’ core deposits. Investment banks, armed with a variety of financial market innovations, challenge banks’ traditional lending products. Banks also find themselves in greater competition with one another as globalization and deregulation weaken geographic boundaries and encourage crossborder ~Europe! and interstate ~U.S.! banking. These developments raise numerous fundamental questions. Will the relationship-oriented European bank system survive competitive pressures in this changing environment? Will U.S. banks focus more on “relationship banking” 1 —whereby banks invest in building relationships with borrowers—or on “transaction banking,” which involves “arm’s length” transactions rather

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/222519.pdf

Can Relationship Banking Survive Competition

Contemporary Banking Theory

This paper is an analysis of when it will be beneficial for agents engaged in the production of information to form coalitions. The model is cast in a financial market framework, thus leading to an identification of conditions sufficient for the existence of financial intermediaries. Intermediation is shown to improve welfare if informational asymmetries are present, and the information generated to rectify these asymmetries is potentially unreliable. The usual appeal to transactions costs to explain intermediation is not needed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2297431.pdf

Information Reliability and a Theory of Financial Intermediation

The authors examine how market structure affects credit allocation under universal risk neutrality and asymmetric information about borrowers. They consider both monopolistic and perf ectly-competitive banks and examine the role of collateral in each ca se. When a bank is a monopolist on the loan side, they find collatera l is never used and asymmetric information results in reduced bank le nding. Under perfect competition, collateral has a useful sorting rol e. Moreover, rationing is possible even with collateral availability and perfectly-elastic deposit supply. In this setting, the authors sh ow co-signers are valuable. Social welfare properties of the monopoly and competitive equilibria are also compared. Copyright 1987 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Collateral and Rationing: Sorting Equilibria in Monopolistic and Competitive Credit Markets

We analyze repeated moral hazard with discounting in a competitive credit market with risk neutrality. Even without learning or risk aversion, long-term bank-borrower relationships are welfare enhancing. The main result is that the borrower obtains an infinite sequence of unsecured loans at below spot market cost following the first good project realization. This contract produces first-best action choices. Prior to this stage, the borrower gets secured loans with above-market borrowing cost. The optimal contract thus displays a "selective memory" feature, taking only one of two forms at any given point in time, depending on prior history. We consider an infinitely repeated bank-borrower relationship with moral hazard and universal risk neutrality, and explore the ramifications of credit contract duration when the two well-known benefits of long-term contracting-learning and improved risk sharing-are absent. Our objectives are twofold. The first is to analyze an infinitely repeated game with discounting in a credit market context. We thus relate the theory of repeated games to financial intermediation theory, particularly to issues of moral hazard and collateral-related distortions. The second objective is to understand noteworthy stylized facts of credit markets, such as durability in credit relationships, lower borrowing costs for established borrowers, and unsecured loans for established borrowers versus secured loans for newer borrowers. While these practices may be partly due to learning, we show that learning is not essential to rationalize them. Even if information decays rapidly and banks learn nothing about borrowers through time, these aspects of credit contracting arise in a repeated-game context. Our main results are as follows. First, despite universal risk neutrality and the absence of learning, a durable bank relationship benefits the borrower.2 The intuition is that the long-term contracting permitted by a durable relationship enables the bank to efficiently tax and subsidize the borrower through time to reduce the use of (costly) collateral. Second, the average welfare loss (due to moral hazard) per period is positive even as the time horizon goes to infinity. Third, the optimal infinite-horizon contract has the striking property that, following the period

Anjan V. Thakor

Papers

Can Relationship Banking Survive Competition

Contemporary Banking Theory

Information Reliability and a Theory of Financial Intermediation

Collateral and Rationing: Sorting Equilibria in Monopolistic and Competitive Credit Markets

Moral hazard and secured lending in an infinitely repeated credit market game