IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/econwp/154.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

In search of economic reality under the veil of financial markets

Author

Listed:
  • Josef Falkinger

Abstract

This paper presents a general equilibrium model with technological uncertainty, financial markets and imperfect information. The future consists of uncertain environments that are more or less clearly distinguishable (measurable). This limits the possibilities of specialization and diversification. Households have no direct information about the productivity of risky technologies. They rely on the information conveyed by the set of financial products provided by the financial sector, the pay-off promises of the products and their prices. Unreliable information-processing by financial markets leads to deception of households. As a result, extending the space spanned by financial products is not unambiguously good. This suggests a policy rule which ties financial innovations to the experience base of the economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Josef Falkinger, 2014. "In search of economic reality under the veil of financial markets," ECON - Working Papers 154, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:zur:econwp:154
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/95370/1/econwp154.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Morris, Stephen & Shin, Hyun Song, 1998. "Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 587-597, June.
    2. 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.
    3. Ricardo J. Caballero, 2010. "Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 24(4), pages 85-102, Fall.
    4. Bai, Jennie & Philippon, Thomas & Savov, Alexi, 2016. "Have financial markets become more informative?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 625-654.
    5. Hirshleifer, Jack, 1971. "The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to Inventive Activity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 61(4), pages 561-574, September.
    6. Modica, Salvatore & Rustichini, Aldo, 1999. "Unawareness and Partitional Information Structures," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 265-298, May.
    7. Cerreia-Vioglio, Simone & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo & Montrucchio, Luigi, 2013. "Ambiguity and robust statistics," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(3), pages 974-1049.
      • Simone Cerreia-Vioglio & Fabio Maccheroni & Massimo Marinacci & Luigi Montrucchio, 2011. "Ambiguity and Robust Statistics," Working Papers 382, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    8. Borio, Claudio, 2014. "The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 182-198.
    9. Michael J. P. Magill & Martine Quinzii & Jean-Charles Rochet, 2013. "A Critique of Shareholder Value Maximization," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 13-16, Swiss Finance Institute.
    10. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May.
    11. Gilboa, Itzhak & Schmeidler, David, 1989. "Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 141-153, April.
    12. Markus K. Brunnermeier & Yuliy Sannikov, 2014. "A Macroeconomic Model with a Financial Sector," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(2), pages 379-421, February.
    13. Acemoglu, Daron & Zilibotti, Fabrizio, 1997. "Was Prometheus Unbound by Chance? Risk, Diversification, and Growth," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(4), pages 709-751, August.
    14. J. M. Keynes, 1937. "The General Theory of Employment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 51(2), pages 209-223.
    15. Markus K. Brunnermeier & Yuliy Sannikov, 2012. "A macroeconomic model with a financial sector," Working Paper Research 236, National Bank of Belgium.
    16. Robin Greenwood & David Scharfstein, 2013. "The Growth of Finance," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(2), pages 3-28, Spring.
    17. Daniel Ellsberg, 1961. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 75(4), pages 643-669.
    18. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1976. "Information and Competitive Price Systems," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(2), pages 246-253, May.
    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. Habib, Michel, 2015. "Multifaceted Transactions, Incentives, and Organizational Form," CEPR Discussion Papers 10432, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Studer, Sabrina & Falkinger, Josef & Zhao, Yingnan, 2015. "Explaining structural changes towards and within the financial sector," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113004, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    3. Falkinger, Josef, 2016. "The order of knowledge and robust action: How to deal with economic uncertainty?," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 10, pages 1-30.

    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. Falkinger, Josef, 2016. "The order of knowledge and robust action: How to deal with economic uncertainty?," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 10, pages 1-30.
    2. Arnold, Lutz G. & Zelzner, Sebastian, 2022. "Financial trading versus entrepreneurship: Competition for talent and negative feedback effects," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 186-199.
    3. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    4. Chahrour, Ryan & Gaballo, Gaetano, 2017. "Learning from prices: amplication and business fluctuations," Working Paper Series 2053, European Central Bank.
    5. Bai, Jennie & Philippon, Thomas & Savov, Alexi, 2016. "Have financial markets become more informative?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 625-654.
    6. Basso, Henrique S., 2022. "Asset holdings, information aggregation in secondary markets and credit cycles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    7. Philipp K. Illeditsch & Jayant V. Ganguli & Scott Condie, 2021. "Information Inertia," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(1), pages 443-479, February.
    8. Toni Ahnert & Ali Kakhbod, 2017. "Information Choice and Amplification of Financial Crises," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(6), pages 2130-2178.
    9. Han, Leyla Jianyu & Kasa, Kenneth & Luo, Yulei, 2024. "Ambiguity, information processing, and financial intermediation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 222(C).
    10. Khwazi Magubane, 2024. "Financial cycles synchronisation in South Africa. A dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) Approach," Cogent Economics & Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1), pages 2321069-232, December.
    11. Muendler, Marc-Andreas, 2007. "The possibility of informationally efficient markets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 467-483, March.
    12. Jiarui Wang & Haijun Yang & Shancun Liu, 2025. "The “two sessions”: institutional investors selloff to avoid ambiguity," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 11(1), pages 1-25, December.
    13. Jessica A. Wachter & Michael Jacob Kahana, 2019. "A Retrieved-Context Theory Of Financial Decisions," NBER Working Papers 26200, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Cukierman, Alex & Izhakian, Yehuda, 2015. "Bailout uncertainty in a microfounded general equilibrium model of the financial system," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 160-179.
    15. Chen, Yong & Kelly, Bryan & Wu, Wei, 2020. "Sophisticated investors and market efficiency: Evidence from a natural experiment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(2), pages 316-341.
    16. Laséen, Stefan & Pescatori, Andrea & Turunen, Jarkko, 2017. "Systemic risk: A new trade-off for monetary policy?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 70-85.
    17. Oana Peia, 2017. "Banking Crises and Investments in Innovation," Working Papers 201727, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    18. Ebrahimi Kahou, Mahdi & Lehar, Alfred, 2017. "Macroprudential policy: A review," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 92-105.
    19. Sujoy Mukerji & Peter Klibanoff and Kyoungwon Seo, 2011. "Relevance and Symmetry," Economics Series Working Papers 539, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    20. Malovaná, Simona & Hodula, Martin & Gric, Zuzana & Bajzík, Josef, 2023. "Macroprudential policy in central banks: Integrated or separate? Survey among academics and central bankers," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Real and financial economics; incomplete knowledge; risk and uncertainty; financial crisis; size of financial sector; responsible finance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D53 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Financial Markets
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology

    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:zur:econwp:154. 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: Severin Oswald (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/seizhch.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.