The Social Value of Financial Expertise

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kurlat, Pablo
• 署名单位: Stanford University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20171735
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 556-590
• 关键词: Adverse selection; MARKET; industry; RECOVERY; default; GROWTH

摘要

I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to measure r, the ratio of the marginal social value to the marginal private value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders' average profits, the fraction of bad assets among traded assets, and the elasticity of good assets traded with respect to capital inflows. I measure r = 0.16 for the junk bond underwriting market. Since this is less than 1, it implies that marginal investments in expertise destroy surplus.