Like many other markets, stock markets are characterised by asymmetric information. If investors cannot distinguish high-quality from low-quality securities, they will value all securities as average resulting in the well known market for lemons. This decreases the allocative efficiency and social welfare by guiding resources to the least good investment opportunities. How can high-quality listed companies communicate with stock markets to distinguish themselves from low-quality listed companies? Although proponents of mandatory disclosure rules in securities markets will answer this question with far-reaching governmental regulation, it is jumping to conclusions and skipping devices that signal the true quality of the investment opportunities to the stock market. This book analyses the functioning of stock markets, in particular the dissemination of price-sensitive information on these markets. In order to evaluate the legal rules governing the dissemination of information from an economic perspective, an operational framework is needed to assess the current disclosure regulation with respect to allocative efficiency. The book replaces vague legal goals of securities regulation, such as investors' protection, by financial economic concepts, such as market efficiency and market liquidity. To enhance allocative efficiency, the book analyses the relevancy of mandatory disclosure rules, the use of trading halts in disseminating information during the opening hours of a stock exchange, the use of selective disclosure and the regulation of insider trading.

Asymmetric information (the fact that borrowers have better information than their lenders) and its theoretical and practical evidence now forms part of the basic tool kit of every financial economist. It is a phenomenon that has major implications for a number of economic and financial issues ranging from both micro and macroeconomic level - corporate debt, investment and dividend policies, the depth and duration of business cycles, the rate of long term economic growth - to the origin of financial and international crises. Asymmetric Information in Financial Markets aims to explain this concept in an accessible way, without jargon and by reducing mathematical complexity. Using elementary algebra and statistics, graphs, and convincing real-world evidence, the author explores the foundations of the problems posed by asymmetries of information in a refreshingly accessible and intuitive way.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Economics - Finance, , course: MBA and Engineering, language: English, abstract: The specter of decreased economic activities, financial crisis, unbecoming ethical standards have in the recent past and fore going, characterized asymmetric information on corporate finance. The consequences normally have a ricochet effect and can be generally catastrophic to normal economic activities to mention the least. This paper considers scenario’s where information asymmetry was prevalent or may have had its effects play out. The typical investor mindset and the opportunity cost associated with the preferred capital structure of the capitalizing process were mentioned. A basis for proper appreciation of the concept – Corporate finance under asymmetric information was initiated here, with a detailed explanation of corporate finance and its components, this was succeeded by a summary of scenarios were asymmetric information were prevalent and an intelligent look was also taken at asymmetric information between insiders and investors and the concomitant lemon problem, where the effects were carefully highlighted in a progression to the level of severity - Market breakdown and costly signaling. The fact that asymmetric information has been widely recognized as bad and generally viewed in a negative light must warrant it being viewed with a high level of seriousness. It is widely known that while lot of effort have been put into stemming the tides of the consequences of asymmetric information, a lot of effort too, have been dedicated to innovation and risk assessment, to capture the interest of investors, who have been affected by the consequences of asymmetric information. These may have formed a veritable platform for a recent paper by Pierre Barbaroux (2014), that elucidated the rise of innovation and innovative entrepreneurs based on the management of asymmetric information. An attempt has in any case, been made here to suggest efforts at marginalizing the negative impacts of asymmetric information and also remedies at reducing the far reaching impacts on the lenders and the aggregate economic activity in general.

The stability of national and, increasingly more often, the global economy relies on well-functioning financial markets. Households' consumption and saving decisions, firms' investment choices, and governments' financing strategies critically depend on the stability of financial markets. These markets, however, are composed of individuals and institutions that may have different objectives, information sets, and beliefs, making them a very complex object that we do not fully comprehend. Motivated by this, my dissertation focuses on understanding how informational asymmetries and belief heterogeneity impact financial markets, and therefore, the macro economy. More specifically, this dissertation explores the sources of informational asymmetries among market participants. How do different financial market structures provide incentives for private information acquisition? Is information acquisition desirable? What types of policies can be implemented to increase liquidity and "discipline" in financial markets? Could business cycles be related to information or belief cycles? I tackle these questions from three separate angles. First, I study how alternative market designs bring forth different levels of private information generation, "market discipline," and liquidity. Second, I investigate how information sets of key market participants are determined. Finally, I focus on how information and belief fluctuations may affect key macroeconomic variables and economic fluctuations. In Chapter 1, ``Information Acquisition vs. Liquidity in Financial Markets," I propose a parsimonious framework to study markets for asset-backed securities (ABS). These markets play an important role in providing lending capacity to the banking industry by allowing banks to sell the cashflows of their loans and thus recycle capital and reduce the riskiness of their portfolios. In the financial crash of 2008, however, in which certain ABS played a substantial role, we witnessed a collapse in the issuance of all ABS classes. Given the importance of these markets for the real economy, policy makers in the US and Europe have geared their efforts towards reviving them. A good framework to think about these markets is imperative when thinking about financial regulation. The contribution of this chapter is to propose a model that captures the two main problems that have been shown to be present in the practice of securitization. First, the increase in securitization has led to a decline in lending standards, suggesting that liquid markets for ABS reduce incentives to issue good quality loans. Second, securitizers have used private information about loan quality when choosing which loans to securitize, indicating that a problem of asymmetric information is present in ABS markets. A natural question then arises: how should ABS be designed to provide incentives to issue good quality loans and, at the same time, to preserve liquidity and trade in these markets? To address this question, I propose a framework to study ABS where both incentives and liquidity issues are considered and linked through a loan issuer's information acquisition decision. Loan issuers acquire private information about potential borrowers, use this information to screen loans, and later design and sell securities backed by these loans when in need of funds. While information is beneficial ex-ante when used to screen loans, it becomes detrimental ex-post because it introduces a problem of adverse selection that hinders trade in ABS markets. The model matches key features of these markets, such as the issuance of senior and junior tranches, and it predicts that when gains from trade in ABS markets are `sufficiently' large, information acquisition and loan screening are inefficiently low. There are two channels that drive this inefficiency. First, when gains from trade are large, a loan issuer is tempted ex-post to sell a large portion of its cashflows and thus does not internalize that lower retention implements less information acquisition. Second, the presence of adverse selection in secondary markets creates informational rents for issuers holding low quality loans, reducing the value of loan screening. This suggests that incentives for loan screening not only depend on the portion of loans retained by issuers, but also on how the market prices the issued tranches. Turning to financial regulation, I characterize the optimal mechanism and show that it can be implemented with a simple tax scheme. The obtained results, therefore, contribute to the recent debate on how to regulate markets for ABS. In Chapter 2, I present joint work with Matthew Botsch, ``Learning by Lending, Do Banks Learn?" where we investigate how banks form their information sets about the quality of their borrowers. There is a vast empirical and theoretical literature that points to the importance of borrower-lender relationships for firms' access to credit. In this chapter, we investigate one particular mechanism through which long-term relationships might improve access to credit. We hypothesize that while lending to a firm, a bank receives signals that allow it to learn and better understand the firm's fundamentals; and that this learning is private; that is, it is information that is not fully reflected in publicly-observable variables. We test this hypothesis using a dataset for 7,618 syndicated loans made between 1987 and 2003. We construct a variable that proxies for firm quality and is unobservable by the bank, so it cannot be priced when the firm enters our sample. We show that the loading on this factor in the pricing equation increases with relationship time, hinting that banks are able to learn about firm quality when they are in an established relationship with the firm. Our finding is robust to controlling for market-wide learning about firm fundamentals. This suggests that a significant portion of bank learning is private and is not shared by all market participants. The results obtained in this study underpin one of the main assumptions of the model presented in Chapter 1: that banks have a special ability to privately acquire valuable information about potential borrowers. While the model is static, the data suggests that the process of lending and of information acquisition is a dynamic one. Consistent with this, the last chapter of this dissertation studies the macroeconomic implications of dynamic learning by financial intermediaries. Chapter 3 presents joint work with Vladimir Asriyan titled ``Informed Intermediation over the Cycle." In this paper, we construct a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which changes in the information held by financial intermediaries generate asymmetric credit cycles as the one observed in the data. We model financial intermediaries as ''expert'' agents who have a unique ability to acquire information about firm fundamentals. While the level of ''expertise'' in the economy grows in tandem with information that the ''experts'' possess, the gains from intermediation are hindered by informational asymmetries. We find the optimal financial contracts and show that the economy inherits not only the dynamic nature of information flow, but also the interaction of information with the contractual setting. We introduce a cyclical component to information by supposing that the fundamentals about which experts acquire information are stochastic. While persistence of fundamentals is essential for information to be valuable, their randomness acts as an opposing force and diminishes the value of expert learning. Our setting then features economic fluctuations due to waves of ``confidence'' in the intermediaries' ability to allocate funds profitably.

The paper analyzes the effects of informational asymmetries on the market structure of the banking industry in a multi-period model of spatial competition. All lenders face uncertainty with regard to borrowers’ creditworthiness, but, in the process of lending, incumbent banks gather proprietary information about their clients, acquiring an advantage over potential entrants. These informational asymmetries are an important determinant of the industry structure and may represent a barrier to entry for new banks. The paper shows that, in contrast with traditional models of horizontal differentiation, the steady-state equilibrium is characterized by a finite number of banks even in the absence of fixed costs.

In this volume, specialists from traditionally separate areas in economics and finance investigate issues at the conjunction of their fields. They argue that financial decisions of the firm can affect real economic activity—and this is true for enough firms and consumers to have significant aggregate economic effects. They demonstrate that important differences—asymmetries—in access to information between "borrowers" and "lenders" ("insiders" and "outsiders") in financial transactions affect investment decisions of firms and the organization of financial markets. The original research emphasizes the role of information problems in explaining empirically important links between internal finance and investment, as well as their role in accounting for observed variations in mechanisms for corporate control.

This open access Pivot demonstrates how a variety of technologies act as innovation catalysts within the banking and financial services sector. Traditional banks and financial services are under increasing competition from global IT companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon and PayPal whilst facing pressure from investors to reduce costs, increase agility and improve customer retention. Technologies such as blockchain, cloud computing, mobile technologies, big data analytics and social media therefore have perhaps more potential in this industry and area of business than any other. This book defines a fintech ecosystem for the 21st century, providing a state-of-the art review of current literature, suggesting avenues for new research and offering perspectives from business, technology and industry.