The paper provides a first analysis of market jump starting and its two-way interaction between mechanism design and participation constraints. The government optimally overpays for the legacy assets ...and cleans up the market of its weakest assets, through a mixture of buybacks and equity injections, and leaves the firms with the strongest legacy assets to the market. The government reduces adverse selection enough to let the market rebound, but not too much, so as to limit the cost of intervention. The existence of a market imposes no welfare cost.
Balancing the banks Dewatripont, Mathias; Rochet, Jean-Charles; Tirole, Jean ...
2010., 20100419, 2010, 2010-04-19, 20100101
eBook
The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. ...Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, Balancing the Banks draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future.
The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately ...insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through a single statistic, and asks whether liquidity should be regulated given that a capital adequacy requirement is already in place. The paper then analyzes market breakdowns due to either adverse selection or shortages of financial muscle, and explains why such breakdowns are endogenous to balance sheet choices and to information acquisition. It then looks at what economics can contribute to the debate on systemic risk and its containment. Finally, the paper takes a macroeconomic perspective, discusses shortages of aggregate liquidity, and analyzes how market value accounting and capital adequacy should react to asset prices. It concludes with a topical form of liquidity provision, monetary bailouts and recapitalizations, and analyzes optimal combinations thereof; it stresses the need for macro-prudential policies.
Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants, and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a ...model of limited cognition and examines its consequences for contractual design.
In this paper, we provide a perspective into the main ideas and findings emerging from the growing literature on motivated beliefs and reasoning. This perspective emphasizes that beliefs often ...fulfill important psychological and functional needs of the individual. Economically relevant examples include confidence in ones' abilities, moral self-esteem, hope and anxiety reduction, social identity, political ideology, and religious faith. People thus hold certain beliefs in part because they attach value to them, as a result of some (usually implicit) tradeoff between accuracy and desirability. In a sense, we propose to treat beliefs as regular economic goods and assets--which people consume, invest in, reap returns from, and produce, using the informational inputs they receive or have access to. Such beliefs will be resistant to many forms of evidence, with individuals displaying non-Bayesian behaviors such as not wanting to know, wishful thinking, and reality denial.
The article shows that time-consistent, imperfectly targeted support to distressed institutions makes private leverage choices strategic complements. When everyone engages in maturity mismatch, ...authorities have little choice but intervening, creating both current and deferred (sowing the seeds of the next crisis) social costs. In turn, it is profitable to adopt a risky balance sheet. These insights have important consequences, from banks choosing to correlate their risk exposures to the need for macro-prudential supervision.
Incentives and Prosocial Behavior Bénabou, Roland; Tirole, Jean
The American economic review,
12/2006, Volume:
96, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We develop a theory of prosocial behavior that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. Rewards or punishments (whether material or ...image-related) create doubt about the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this "overjustification effect" can induce a partial or even net crowding out ofprosocial behavior by extrinsic incentives. We also identify the settings that are conducive to multiple social norms and, more generally, those that make individual actions complements or substitutes, which we show depends on whether stigma or honor is (endogenously) the dominant reputational concern. Finally, we analyze the socially optimal level of incentives and how monopolistic or competitive sponsors depart from it. Sponsor competition is shown to potentially reduce social welfare.
Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as alternative responses to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We draw on recent developments ...in the psychology and economics of prosocial behaviour to shed light on this trend and the underlying mix of motivations. We then link individual concerns to corporate social responsibility, contrasting three possible understandings of the term: firms' adoption of a more long-term perspective, the delegated exercise of prosocial behaviour on behalf of stakeholders, and insider-initiated corporate philanthropy. We discuss the benefits, costs and limits of socially responsible behaviour as a means to further societal goals.
When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant ...from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science, " is a positive force for the common good. Economists are rewarded for writing technical papers in scholarly journals, not joining in public debates. But Tirole says we urgently need economists to engage with the many challenges facing society, helping to identify our key objectives and the tools needed to meet them. To show how economics can help us realize the common good, Tirole shares his insights on a broad array of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation. Providing a rich account of how economics can benefit everyone, Economics for the Common Good sets a new agenda for the role of economics in society. -- Provided by publisher
We build a simple model to capture the major virtues and drawbacks of making public officials accountable {i.e., subjecting them to reelection): On the one hand, accountability allows the public to ...screen and discipline their officials; on the other, it may induce those officials to pander to public opinion and put too little weight on minority welfare. We study when decision-making powers should be allocated to the public directly (direct democracy), to accountable officials (called "politicians"), or to nonaccountable officials (called "judges").
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