We show that in an imperfect information environment the equity value of an impaired bank may increase or decrease when it is required to meet a capital standard. Regardless of the change in the bank's equity value, however, its stock price will fall in response to a forced recapitalization, consistent with recent empirical evidence. Simulations of our model suggest that this stock price decline is likely to be larger the smaller is the share of ownership held by the managers of the bank, also consistent with recent empirical evidence in the literature. Our model further predicts a rise in bank's non-interest expenses following a required recapitalization. Given the increase in the regulator's exposure that would accompany a reduction in the bank's market value of equity, the regulator may choosenotto enforce the regulation. Hence, capital regulation may be time-inconsistent in this situation and consequently not have its intended risk-mitigating incentives.

We characterize a credit market equilibrium in which banks coexist with capital markets and firms obtain funding from both sources. An incentive problem exists between the firm’s insiders and outside providers of capital. Banks can provide not only credit but also monitoring services. We show that when banks cannot precommit to a particular level of monitoring, there is a unique credit market equilibrium with firms being financed with a combination of bank credit and external capital. In this equilibrium, a marginal substitution of bank credit for capital market financing would raise the firm’s stock price.

We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We assess the welfare implications of the ensuing competition for the market using analytical and numerical approaches to compare the equilibria of a learning-by-doing model to the first-best planner solution. We show that dynamic competition leads to low deadweight loss. This cannot be attributed to similarity between the equilibria and the planner solution. Instead, we show how learning-by-doing causes the various contributions to deadweight loss to either be small or partly offset each other.

We formally characterize predatory pricing in a modern industry-dynamics framework that endogenizes competitive advantage and industry structure. As an illustrative example we focus on learning-by-doing. To disentangle predatory pricing from mere competition for efficiency on a learning curve we decompose the equilibrium pricing condition. We show that forcing firms to ignore the predatory incentives in setting their prices can have a large impact and that this impact stems from eliminating equilibria with predation-like behavior. Along with the predation-like behavior, however, a fair amount of competition for the market is eliminated.

An informational alliance involves the consolidation of the private information of independent suppliers in anticipation of a contracting opportunity with a principal. An informational alliance is an intermediate form of organization between the consolidation of information as in a merger and the suppliers remaining separate entities. It can Pareto dominate a merger, independent contracting, and hierarchical contracting, so a principal can benefit by allowing suppliers to organize the supply network. An informational alliance forms at the nexus of internally-verifiable private information. The principal's contracting problem then involves a participation condition with a reservation value that is a function of type.

This paper considers a multiperiod model of a regulated firm that has (stationary) private inf ormation, which may be revealed through performance. A "Fairness" arrangement is proposed in which the firm agrees not to quit if in future periods the regulator allows it to earn a nonnegative profit given the type it revealed in earlier periods. The properties of such arrangements are studied, and an example is presented in which both the firm and the regulator prefer a fairness arrangement to a policy feasible without commitment.

A sequential equilibrium model of private antitrust enforcement is presented. Consumers have incomplete information about cartel costs and cannot accurately estimate a priori the damage recovery from an antitrust action. Consumers are able to infer cartel costs from the equilibrium pricing strategy of firms. The universal divinity criterion is used to characterize the sequential equilibrium. It is shown that, for a sufficiently large damage multiple, antitrust enforcement effectively increases social welfare.

A monopolist that sells in a market in which consumers differ in their willingness to pay for quality will distort and enlarge the range of products offered for sale. We examine the positive and normative impacts of remedies used to counteract such distortions. For the case of a price ceiling, the monopolist improves quality at the low quality end of the market, offsetting the distortion induced by the unregulated exercise of monopoly power. Social welfare can be shown to increase for a sufficiently slight degree of price regulation. For minimum quality standards, the social welfare implications are ambiguous because the standards may exclude some consumers from the market.