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The Social Value of Financial Expertise

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  • Pablo Kurlat

Abstract

I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to estimate the ratio of social to private marginal value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders' average profits, the fraction of bad assets among traded assets and the elasticity of good assets traded with respect to capital inflows. For venture capital, the ratio is between 0.64 and 0.83 and for junk bond underwriting, it is between 0.09 and 0.26. In both cases this is less than one so at the margin financial expertise destroys surplus.

Suggested Citation

  • Pablo Kurlat, 2016. "The Social Value of Financial Expertise," NBER Working Papers 22047, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22047
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    Cited by:

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    2. Kirill Shakhnov, 2022. "The Allocation of Talent: Finance versus Entrepreneurship," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 46, pages 161-195, October.
    3. Asano, Koji, 2024. "Managing financial expertise," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 89(PA), pages 351-365.
    4. Tobias Dieler & Sonny Biswas & Giacomo Calzolari & Fabio Castiglionesi, 2023. "Asset Trade, Real Investment, and a Tilting Financial Transaction Tax," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(4), pages 2401-2424, April.
    5. Laurent Barras & Patrick Gagliardini & Olivier Scaillet, 2022. "Skill, Scale, and Value Creation in the Mutual Fund Industry," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 77(1), pages 601-638, February.
    6. Kurlat, Pablo, 2021. "Investment externalities in models of fire sales," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 102-118.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D53 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Financial Markets
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

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