This paper studies the role of trust in incumbent lenders (banks) as an entry barrier to emerging FinTech lenders in credit markets. The empirical setting exploits the outbreak of the Wells Fargo scandal as a negative shock to borrowers’ trust in banks. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that increased exposure to the Wells Fargo scandal leads to an increase in the probability of borrowers using FinTech as mortgage originators. Utilizing political affiliation to proxy for the magnitude of trust erosion in banks in a triple-differences specification, I find that, conditional on the same exposure to the scandal, a county experiencing a greater erosion of trust has a larger increase in FinTech share relative to a county experiencing less of an erosion of trust. Estimating treatment effect heterogeneity using generic machine learning inference suggests that borrowers with the greatest decrease in trust in banks and the greatest increase in FinTech adoption have similar characteristics.

A screening instrument is costly if it is socially wasteful and productive otherwise. A principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information and quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a one-dimensional productive component and a multidimensional costly component. Can the principal improve upon simple one-dimensional mechanisms by also using the costly instruments? We show that if the agent has preferences between the two components that are positively correlated in a suitably defined sense, then simply screening the productive component is optimal. The result holds for general type and allocation spaces, and allows for nonlinear and interdependent valuations. We discuss applications to monopoly pricing, bundling, and labour market screening.

The 2023 banking turmoil highlighted how technological advancements have significantly accelerated the speed of bank runs. This paper investigates the impact of these faster bank runs on the effectiveness of policy interventions by interpreting them as a constraint on the relative speed of policy responses. Using a model of bank runs and ex-post policy responses, we examine how delays caused by this constraint affect financial fragility and welfare. We find that while delays exacerbate welfare loss by distorting allocations, they may also decrease fragility by making banks more cautious. We study the optimal level of structural delay, balancing the trade-off between distributional distortions and financial fragility. Furthermore, we extend this model to explore the roles of liquidity regulations and capital injections given such a delay. We show that regulation may be more desirable than a capital injection if the delay is substantial because the benefit of decreased fragility is particularly potent.

This article develops an integrated model of asset pricing and moral hazard. It is demonstrated that the expected dollar return of a stock is independent of managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk, but the equilibrium price of the stock depends on them. Thus, the expected rate of return is affected by managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk. It is shown, however, that managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk affect the expected rate of return through their influence on systematic risk rather than serve as independent risk factors. It is also shown that the risk aversion of the principal in the model leads to less emphasis on relative performance evaluation than in a model with a risk-neutral principal.

This article develops an integrated model of asset pricing and moral hazard. It is demonstrated that the expected dollar return of a stock is independent of managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk, but the equilibrium price of the stock depends on them. Thus, the expected rate of return is affected by managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk. It is shown, however, that managerial incentives and idiosyncratic risk affect the expected rate of return through their influence on systematic risk rather than serve as independent risk factors. It is also shown that the risk aversion of the principal in the model leads to less emphasis on relative performance evaluation than in a model with a risk-neutral principal. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

This article studies the contracting problem between an individual investor and a professional portfolio manager in a continuous-time principal-agent framework. Optimal contracts are obtained in closed form. These contracts are of a symmetric form and suggest that a portfolio manager should receive a fixed fee, a fraction of the total assets under management, plus a bonus or a penalty depending upon the portfolio's excess return relative to a benchmark portfolio. The appropriate benchmark portfolio is an active index that contains risky assets where the number of shares invested in each asset can vary over time, rather than a passive index in which the number of shares invested in each asset remains constant over time.

This article studies the contracting problem between an individual investor and a professional portfolio manager in a continuous-time principal-agent framework. Optimal contracts are obtained in closed form. These contracts are of a symmetric form and suggest that a portfolio manager should receive a fixed fee, a fraction of the total assets under management, plus a bonus or a penalty depending upon the portfolio's excess return relative to a benchmark portfolio. The appropriate benchmark portfolio is an active index that contains risky assets where the number of shares invested in each asset can vary over time, rather than a passive index in which the number of shares invested in each asset remains constant over time. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

Introduction JN spite of the voluminous studies that have been made on the theory of the consumption function, one important question remains unanswered. Does the Keynesian theorem of consumer behavior operate in any modern community as Keynes claimed it would? ' The first section of this paper will be devoted to testing the Keynesian hypotheses: (1) the level of current income is the main determinant of the level of current consumption in the short run, and (2) the marginal propensity to consume is less than unity. In the second section, we shall examine factors affecting the differences in aggregate consumption ratios of various nations. While much effort has been spent on study of the aggregate consumption function of the United States, our knowledge of the consumption patterns of countries in the rest of the free world, particularly of less advanced countries, continues to lag.2 The relative scarcity of research in this area has been due primarily to the absence of reliable data. Until the introduction of a uniform national account system by the United Nations in 1947, national income data were virtually non-existent except for the highly developed countries.3 As reports of the member nations have been published for a number of years, sufficient data are now available to calculate and compare the aggregate consumption functions of various nations. The following criteria were used in selecting countries for this study:

The rise of investments professionally managed with a socially responsible mandate has generated growing interest in environmental and social ratings. However, it is not clear how informative these ratings are or whether they are distorted by greenwashing. Based on the ratings of the leading provider, I offer the first evidence linking greenwashing to ratings inflation. Better ratings do not predict less future corporate bad behavior. This is of concern because it undermines the signaling value of these ratings. To understand these results, I develop a model where the rating agency may underinvest in greenwashing detection while firms have incentives to window dress and engage in greenwashing. Finally, controlling for greenwashing improves ratings predictive quality.

Market prices are noisy signals of economic fundamentals. In a two-period model, we show that if the central bank uses market prices as guidance for intervention, large strategic investors who benefit from high prices would depress market prices to induce a market-supportive intervention. Stronger anticipated interventions lead to deeper price depressions preintervention and sharper price reversals post-intervention. The central bank intervention harms strategic investors even though it is the investors who tried to mislead the central bank. The model predicts a V-shaped price pattern around central bank interventions, consistent with recent evidence. (JEL G14, G18)