Knowledge that Transforms

We use a model of mean-shifting investment technologies to study the relationship between market structure, risk taking and social welfare in lending markets. Introduction of loan market competition is shown to reduce lending rates and to generate higher investments without increasing the equilibrium bankruptcy risk of borrowers. Hence, there need not be a tradeoff between lending market competition and financial fragility. Such a tradeoff may not emerge either when banks compete by conditioning interest rates on investment volumes irrespectively of whether credit rationing takes place or not.

In accordance with studies for other markets, Swedish index returns exhibit high autocorrelation, (a) after days of above average performance of the stock market, (b) after low absolute returns, (c) when trading volume is low, and (d) following Fridays. Contrary to the non-synchronous trading and the transaction cost hypotheses, all results extend to individual stock returns. It is concluded that autocorrelation patterns are related to the trading patterns of individual investors, and not the cross-security information processing of the market. In particular, the observed autocorrelation structure corresponds to feedback trading.