IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/12075.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Asset Prices When Agents are Marked-to-Market

Author

Listed:
  • Gary Gorton
  • Ping He
  • Lixin Huang

Abstract

"Risk management" in securities markets refers to the oversight of portfolio managers and professional traders when they trade on behalf of investors in security markets. Monitoring of their trading performance, profit and loss, and risk-taking behavior, is measured by principals using security market prices. We study the optimality of the practice of marking-to-market and provide conditions under which investing principals should optimally monitor their agent traders using market prices to measure traders' performance. Asset prices, however, can be affected by mark-to-market contracts. We show that such contracts introduce an externality when there are many traders. Traders may rationally herd, trading on irrelevant information. Ironically, this causes asset prices to be less informative than they would be without the mark-to-market feature.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary Gorton & Ping He & Lixin Huang, 2006. "Asset Prices When Agents are Marked-to-Market," NBER Working Papers 12075, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12075
    Note: AP CF
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12075.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Eitan Goldman & Steve L. Slezak, 2003. "Delegated Portfolio Management and Rational Prolonged Mispricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(1), pages 283-311, February.
    2. Brennan, Michael J., 1993. "Agency and Asset Pricing," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt53k014sd, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    3. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1980. "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 393-408, June.
    4. Bhattacharya, Sudipto & Pfleiderer, Paul, 1985. "Delegated portfolio management," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 1-25, June.
    5. Admati, Anat R & Pfleiderer, Paul, 1997. "Does It All Add Up? Benchmarks and the Compensation of Active Portfolio Managers," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 70(3), pages 323-350, July.
    6. Dow, James & Gorton, Gary, 1994. " Arbitrage Chains," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(3), pages 819-849, July.
    7. Bengt Holmstrom, 1982. "Moral Hazard in Teams," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 13(2), pages 324-340, Autumn.
    8. Dow, James & Gorton, Gary, 1997. "Noise Trading, Delegated Portfolio Management, and Economic Welfare," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(5), pages 1024-1050, October.
    9. Hui Ou-Yang, 2003. "Optimal Contracts in a Continuous-Time Delegated Portfolio Management Problem," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 16(1), pages 173-208.
    10. Franklin Allen, 2001. "Do Financial Institutions Matter?," Center for Financial Institutions Working Papers 01-04, Wharton School Center for Financial Institutions, University of Pennsylvania.
    11. Franklin Allen & Gary Gorton, 1993. "Churning Bubbles," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 60(4), pages 813-836.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gary B. Gorton, 2008. "The Panic of 2007," NBER Working Papers 14358, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Gorton, Gary B., 2008. "The panic of 2007," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 131-262.
    3. Dasgupta, Amil & Prat, Andrea, 2008. "Information aggregation in financial markets with career concerns," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 83-113, November.
    4. Stephen Golub & Ayse Kaya & Michael Reay, 2015. "What were they thinking? The Federal Reserve in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(4), pages 657-692, August.
    5. repec:eee:jmacro:v:52:y:2017:i:c:p:287-307 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Amil Dasgupta & Andrea Prat & Michela Verardo, 2011. "Institutional Trade Persistence and Long‐Term Equity Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(2), pages 635-653, April.
    7. Micah L. Ingalls & Michael B. Dwyer, 2016. "Missing the forest for the trees? Navigating the trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation under REDD," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 136(2), pages 353-366, May.

    More about this item

    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:nbr:nberwo:12075. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.