[In the IPO market, investors coordinate on acceptable IPO price based on the performance of past IPOs, and this generates an incentive for investment banks to produce information about IPO firms. In hot periods, the information produced by investment banks improves the quality of IPO firms, and this allows ex ante low quality firms to go public and increases the secondary market price, thus synchronizing high IPO volumes and high first day returns. When investment banks behave asymmetrically in information production, the "reputations" of investment banks are interpreted as a form of market segmentation to economize on the social cost of information production]

In the IPO market, investors coordinate on acceptable IPO price based on the performance of past IPOs, and this generates an incentive for investment banks to produce information about IPO firms. In hot periods, the information produced by investment banks improves the quality of IPO firms, and this allows ex ante low quality firms to go public and increases the secondary market price, thus synchronizing high IPO volumes and high first day returns. When investment banks behave asymmetrically in information production, the "reputations" of investment banks are interpreted as a form of market segmentation to economize on the social cost of information production.

In an economy where banks take numeraire goods, so called money, as deposits, money allows depositors suffering preference shocks to withdraw from banks prematurely without liquidation of real investment. If real liquidity, defined as the real value of the monetary base, is low, the amount of payment liquidity, constrained by the velocity of money, limits the short-term price level of investment goods before banks can settle their long-term loan contracts. This leads to an attractive nominal long-term investment return and over-investment. Allowing for inside money, that is, bank deposits, to be used for payment can improve social welfare but cannot fully resolve the liquidity shortage problem as the short-term interest rate offered by banks is constrained by the threat of bank runs. In the presence of systemic liquidity shocks, the price-adjustment mechanism cannot take full effects with insufficient payment liquidity, which can lead to non-zero profits for banks. Exchanging investment goods for numeraire goods through international trade can improve social welfare.

A bank determines whether potential borrowers are creditworthy, that is, whether they meet the bank's credit or lending standards. In making this determination, each bank is in competition with other banks, but without knowing the competitor banks' credit standards. The resulting unique form of competition leads to endogenous credit cycles, periodic "credit crunches". Empirical tests of this repeated bank lending game are constructed based on parameterizing public information about relative bank performance that is at the root of banks' beliefs about rival banks' lending standards. The relative performance of rival banks has predictive power for subsequent lending in the credit card market, where we can identify the main competitors. At the macroeconomic level, the relative bank performance of commercial and industrial loans is an autonomous source of macroeconomic fluctuations. In an asset pricing context, the relative bank performance is a priced risk factor for both banks and non-financial firms. The factor coefficients for non-financial firms are decreasing with size, consistent with smaller firms being more bank dependent. Copyright 2008, Wiley-Blackwell.

Modeling state transitions of loan accounts as Markov transition matrixes, we propose a method for detecting the significance and quantifying the magnitude of collection effects on consumer term loan accounts. Quantification of the collection effect provides a theoretical basis for making optimal collection decisions with respect to loan accounts. A parameterization process is presented to reduce the number of parameters required to estimate. The quantification process consists of two steps. First, a Chi-square test detects whether the transition probability distributions with and without collection differ significantly. Second, a regression and a t-test are used to assess the magnitude of the collection effect. Application of this method to quantify collection effects in a Chinese automobile loan financing company shows that the method is able to recognize the magnitude and significance of collection effects. This paper further sets forth suggestions on how to design an experiment for necessary data collection.

The disciplinary role of the financial market could interact with a firm's choice of internal corporate governance. We prove that when the efficiency of the initial public offering (IPO) pricing improves, entrepreneurs choose stronger corporate governance structures as way of committing to extract fewer private benefits in exchange for higher prices. Using a difference-in-difference method that exploits the asymmetric impacts of the IPO pricing deregulation on the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong markets, we find that improving the efficiency of IPO pricing has a positive impact on a firm's corporate governance quality. This impact is more pronounced for firms with lower tangibility, for firms with higher market-to-book ratios, and for state-owned enterprises. Our findings demonstrate that the development of the financial market can promote economic development through improving corporate governance.