Essays in financial economics

This dissertation is made of three distinct chapters. In the first chapter, which is joint with Edouard Challe, we analyse the joint determination of price informativeness and the composition of the market by order type in a large asset market with dispersed information. The market microstructure is one in which informed traders may place market orders or full demand schedules and where market makers set the price. Market-order traders trade less aggressively on their information and thus reduce the informativeness of the price; in a full market-order market, price informativeness is bounded, whatever the quality of traders’ information about the asset’s dividend. When traders can choose their order type and demand schedules are (even marginally) costlier than market orders, then market-order traders overwhelm the market when the precision of private signals goes to infinity. This is because demand schedules are substitutes: at high levels of precision, a residual fraction of demand-schedule traders is sufficient to take the trading price close to traders’ signals, while the latter is itself well aligned with the dividend. Hence, the gain from trading conditional on the price (as demand-schedule traders do) in addition to one’s own signal (as all informed traders do) vanishes. We then apply this idea in the second chapter of this dissertation. Speculators contemplating an attack (e.g., on a currency peg) must guess the beliefs of other speculators, which they can do by looking at the stock market. This chapter examines whether this information-gathering process is stabilizing by better anchoring expectations or destabilizing by creating multiple self-fulfilling equilibria. To do so, we study the outcome of a two-stage global game wherein an asset price determined at the trading stage of the game provides an endogenous public signal about the fundamental that affects traders’ decision to attack in the coordination stage of the game. The trading stage follows the microstructure of the first chapter. Price execution risk reduces traders’ aggressiveness and hence slows down information aggregation, which ultimately makes multiple equilibria in the coordination stage less likely. In this sense, microstructure frictions that lead to greater individual exposure (to price execution risk) may reduce aggregate uncertainty (by pinning down a unique equilibrium outcome). Finally, in the third chapter, joint with Victor Lyonnet, we present a model of the interactions between traditional and shadow banks that speaks to their coexistence. In the 2007 financial crisis, some of shadow banks’ assets and liabilities have moved to traditional banks, and assets were sold at fire sale prices. Our model is able to accommodate these stylized facts. The difference between traditional and shadow banks is twofold. First, traditional banks have access to a guarantee fund that enables them to issue claims to households in a crisis. Second, traditional banks have to comply with costly regulation. We show that in a crisis, shadow banks liquidate assets to repay their creditors, while traditional banks purchase these assets at fire-sale prices. This exchange of assets in a crisis generates a complementarity between traditional and shadow banks, where each type of intermediary benefits from the presence of the other. We find two competing effects from a small decrease in traditional banks’ support in a crisis, which we dub a substitution effect and an income effect. The latter effect dominates the former, so that lower anticipated support to traditional banks in a crisis induces more bankers to run a traditional bank ex-ante.