The Economics Of Asymmetric Information

This book presents recent developments in the economics of asymmetric information. The problems of selection and moral hazard, with hidden actions or hidden information, are introduced by examining how they affect the market for investment finance. The ideas are then used to analyse the market for insurance, signalling and screening models of education, efficiency wages, industrial regulation, public procurement and auctions. Coverage is thorough while avoiding excessive mathematical detail. Diagrams and verbal reasoning make the ideas accessible to intermediate level undergraduate students and beyond.

The study of the interaction between the financial sector and the sector of the economy is one of the most recent advances in macroeconomic theory. While mainstream economics assigns a passive role to the financial sector there is a growing body of literature which emphasizes the importance of financial intermediaries in explaining fluctuations and the determination of the process through which monetary policy impulses are transmitted to the rest of the economy. This literature has its origin in the models that rely on asymmetric information to explain imperfections in financial markts and in empirical evidence collected through various econometric techniques and through historical studies. This book surveys the relevant work ion the subject, evaluates the empirical evidence and the explanatory power of the theories proposed and furnishes new and empirical results.

Asymmetric information (the fact that borrowers have better information than their lenders) and its theoretical and practical evidence now forms part of the basic tool kit of every financial economist. It is a phenomenon that has major implications for a number of economic and financial issues ranging from both micro and macroeconomic level - corporate debt, investment and dividend policies, the depth and duration of business cycles, the rate of long term economic growth - to the origin of financial and international crises. Asymmetric Information in Financial Markets aims to explain this concept in an accessible way, without jargon and by reducing mathematical complexity. Using elementary algebra and statistics, graphs, and convincing real-world evidence, the author explores the foundations of the problems posed by asymmetries of information in a refreshingly accessible and intuitive way.

Contributed papers presented at the one of the technical sessions of Indian Economic Association's 85th conference held at the Kerala University in 2002.

In this volume, specialists from traditionally separate areas in economics and finance investigate issues at the conjunction of their fields. They argue that financial decisions of the firm can affect real economic activity—and this is true for enough firms and consumers to have significant aggregate economic effects. They demonstrate that important differences—asymmetries—in access to information between "borrowers" and "lenders" ("insiders" and "outsiders") in financial transactions affect investment decisions of firms and the organization of financial markets. The original research emphasizes the role of information problems in explaining empirically important links between internal finance and investment, as well as their role in accounting for observed variations in mechanisms for corporate control.

In credit markets, asymmetric information problems arise when borrowers have private information about their creditworthiness that is not observable by lenders. If these informational asymmetries do not negatively affect lenders' profitability, then they are irrelevant to lenders.

The problems arising from the existence of asymmetric information in public decision making have been widely explored by economists. Most of the traditional analysis of public sector activities has been reviewed to take accountofthe possible distortions arising from an asymmetric distribution of relevant information among the actors of the public decision-making process. A normative approach has been developed to design incentive schemes which tackle adverse selection and moral hazard problems within public organisations: our understanding of these problems is now much better, and some of the mechanisms designed have had important practical implications. While this analysis is still under way in many fields of public economics, as the papers by Jones and Zanola, and Trimarchi witness, a debate is ongoing on the possible theoretical limitations ofthis approach and on its actual relevance for public sector activities. This book encompasses different contributions to these issues, on both theoretical and practical areas, which were firstly presented at a conference in Catania. The innermost problem in the current discussion arises from the fact that this normative analysis is firmly rooted in the complete contracting framework, with the consequence that, despite the analytical complexities of most models, their results rely on very simplified assumptions. Most complexities of the organisation of public sector, and more generally, of writing "contracts", are therefore swept away.