IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lmu/muenec/20937.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Opacity on Financial Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Siegert, Caspar

Abstract

We analyze the incentives for information disclosure in financial markets. We show that borrowers may have incentives to voluntarily withhold information and that doing so is most attractive for claims that are inherently hard to value, such as portfolios of subprime mortgages. Interestingly, opacity may be optimal even though it increases informational asymmetries between contracting parties. Finally, in our setting a government can intervene in ways that ensure the liquidity of financial markets and that resemble the initial plans for TARP. Even if such interventions are ex-post optimal, they affect incentives for information disclosure and have ambiguous ex-ante effects.

Suggested Citation

  • Siegert, Caspar, 2014. "Optimal Opacity on Financial Markets," Discussion Papers in Economics 20937, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:lmu:muenec:20937
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20937/1/Caspar.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrea Attar & Thomas Mariotti & François Salanié, 2011. "Nonexclusive Competition in the Market for Lemons," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(6), pages 1869-1918, November.
    2. Enrica Detragiache & Paolo Garella & Luigi Guiso, 2000. "Multiple versus Single Banking Relationships: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(3), pages 1133-1161, June.
    3. Frederic Malherbe, 2014. "Self-Fulfilling Liquidity Dry-Ups," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(2), pages 947-970, April.
    4. Sharpe, Steven A, 1990. "Asymmetric Information, Bank Lending, and Implicit Contracts: A Stylized Model of Customer Relationships," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(4), pages 1069-1087, September.
    5. Jean Tirole, 2012. "Overcoming Adverse Selection: How Public Intervention Can Restore Market Functioning," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 29-59, February.
    6. Vincent Bignon & Régis Breton, 2004. "Accounting Transparency and the Cost of Capital," Post-Print halshs-00256861, HAL.
    7. Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden, 1995. "Long-Term Contracts, Short-Term Investment and Monitoring," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 62(4), pages 557-575.
    8. Kahn, Charles & Huberman, Gur, 1988. "Two-sided Uncertainty and "Up-or-Out" Contracts," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 6(4), pages 423-444, October.
    9. George A. Akerlof, 1970. "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 84(3), pages 488-500.
    10. Ingo Fender & Nikola Tarashev & Haibin Zhu, 2008. "Credit fundamentals, ratings and value-at-risk: CDOs versus corporate exposures," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    11. Ongena, Steven & Smith, David C., 2000. "What Determines the Number of Bank Relationships? Cross-Country Evidence," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 26-56, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mahrt-Smith, Jan, 2006. "Should banks own equity stakes in their borrowers? A contractual solution to hold-up problems," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(10), pages 2911-2929, October.
    2. , & , & ,, 2014. "Nonexclusive competition under adverse selection," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 9(1), January.
    3. Farinha, Luisa A. & Santos, Joao A. C., 2002. "Switching from Single to Multiple Bank Lending Relationships: Determinants and Implications," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 124-151, April.
    4. Egli, Dominik & Ongena, Steven & Smith, David C., 2006. "On the sequencing of projects, reputation building, and relationship finance," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 23-39, March.
    5. Saibal Ghosh, 2019. "Lending Relationships, Borrowing Costs and Crisis: Evidence from Indian Micro Data," Global Business Review, International Management Institute, vol. 20(4), pages 1026-1050, August.
    6. Hans Degryse & Steven Ongena, 2002. "Bank-Firm Relationships and International Banking Markets," International Journal of the Economics of Business, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(3), pages 401-417.
    7. Ogane, Yuta, 2023. "The number of bank relationships and bank lending to informationally opaque SMEs," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    8. Saibal Ghosh, 2016. "Small business, lending relationships and crisis: evidence from Indian micro data," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 43(1), pages 1-15, March.
    9. Ghosh, Chinmoy & He, Fan, 2023. "The impact of laws and institutions on financial contracts: Evidence from relationship lending across the world," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    10. Hans Degryse & Vasso Ioannidou & Erik von Schedvin, 2016. "On the Nonexclusivity of Loan Contracts: An Empirical Investigation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(12), pages 3510-3533, December.
    11. Carbó-Valverde, Santiago & Cuadros-Solas, Pedro J. & Rodríguez-Fernández, Francisco, 2021. "The impact of lending relationships on the choice and structure of bond underwriting syndicates," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    12. Marcello D'Amato & Christian Di Pietro & Marco M. Sorge, 2019. "Serving the (Un)Deserving? The Allocation of Credit in Markets with Asymmetrically Informed Lenders," CSEF Working Papers 539, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    13. Hans Degryse & Nancy Masschelein & Janet Mitchell, 2004. "Belgian SMEs and bank lending relationships," Financial Stability Review, National Bank of Belgium, vol. 2(1), pages 121-133, June.
    14. Berger, Allen N. & Klapper, Leora F. & Martinez Peria, Maria Soledad & Zaidi, Rida, 2008. "Bank ownership type and banking relationships," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 37-62, January.
    15. Marco Airaudo & María Pía Olivero, 2019. "Optimal Monetary Policy with Countercyclical Credit Spreads," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 51(4), pages 787-829, June.
    16. Andrea Attar & Thomas Mariotti & François Salanié, 2020. "The Social Costs of Side Trading," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 130(630), pages 1608-1622.
    17. Ginés Hernández-Cánovas & Pedro Martínez-Solano, 2007. "Effect of the Number of Banking Relationships on Credit Availability: Evidence from Panel Data of Spanish Small Firms," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 28(1), pages 37-53, January.
    18. Jarko Fidrmuc & Philipp Schreiber & Martin Siddiqui, 2018. "Intangible Assets and the Determinants of a Single Bank Relation of German SMEs," European Journal of Business Science and Technology, Mendel University in Brno, Faculty of Business and Economics, vol. 4(1), pages 5-30.
    19. Bruno Biais & Thomas Mariotti, 2005. "Strategic Liquidity Supply and Security Design," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 72(3), pages 615-649.
    20. Doris Neuberger & Solvig Räthke, 2009. "Microenterprises and multiple bank relationships: The case of professionals," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 32(2), pages 207-229, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Information Acquisition; Adverse Selection; Allocative Efficiency; Opacity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lmu:muenec:20937. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tamilla Benkelberg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.