Two Essays On The Role Of Information Flow In Financial Markets PDF Download

This dissertation contains three independent essays. The first two essays look at the informational role of stock prices and its impact on the real economy. The last one explores the relationship between managerial incentive and product market competition. In the first essay, two firms compete in a product market and have an opportunity to invest in a risky technology either early on as a leader or later once stock prices reveal the value of the technology. Information leakage thus introduces an option of waiting, which enhances production efficiency. A potential leader may nevertheless be discouraged from investing upfront, when anticipating its competitor to invest later in response to good news. I show that an increase in product market competition increases the option value of waiting but has an ambiguous effect on information production. It may thus be the case that intense competition leads to more leakage such that no firm would invest, especially so in a smaller market. Given a moderate level of competition, price informativeness may improve investment outcome when investment profitability and the market size are relatively large. The second essay examines the feedback effects of certifications in financial markets. A firm has to decide whether to monitor (or to ascertain) internally the prospect of a potential investment or to delegate this task to a certifier who reveals his evaluations to the outsiders. The investment decision is then taken based on all of the information available in the market. The information asymmetry between the firm and lenders is alleviated under delegation, and hence the firm enjoys a lower cost of capital at the financing stage. Delegation however reduces the information advantage of speculators who then make less effort to acquire information. This results in a potential information crowding-out effect. We show that the firm may prefer to delegate when the prior belief about the investment prospect is relatively high, and to choose in-house information production when its own signal is more precise and when its current assets in place generate a higher expected payoff. The third essay considers a spatial competition model with horizontal and vertical differentiation. Two firms are assigned to exogenous locations on a circular city. Consumers, distributed on the circle, need to pay a transportation cost for purchasing. Anticipating a future uncertainty in product quality, firms simultaneously offer incentive contracts to managers to induce an optimal effort level. I show that competition may adversely affects incentives, as a lower transportation cost impairs a firm's local market power and consequently reduces a firm's marginal benefit from producing a high quality product, particularly when its competitor also produces a high quality product. On the other hand, greater competition reduces a firm's profit if it fails to improve product quality. This effect increases the optimal effort level and becomes dominant if the quality improvement is relatively large compared to the effort cost. Moreover, a large decrease in the transportation cost may change the market structure, such that the firm with better quality goods attracts all the demand, and thus the positive effect of competition on managerial effort becomes more significant.