Essays in Industrial Organization and Finance

Essays in Industrial Organization and Finance
Author: Thomas Rutford Covert
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014
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This dissertation consists of two essays on the behavior of traders in opaque financial markets and one on the behavior of firms while they are learning to use a new technology.

Essays on Industrial Organization and Finance

Essays on Industrial Organization and Finance
Author: Menghan Xu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2016
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The dissertation consists of three essays on industrial organization with a particular focus on the structures of financial markets. The first chapter theoretically studies how search friction affects competition and resource allocation in crowdfunding loan markets, which are described using a many-to-one matching framework. Namely, competitive fundraisers must accumulate multiple investors to complete a transaction. I develop a dynamic matching model with a fixed sample search, a la Burdett and Judd (1983), in which fundraisers compete in interest rates while investors look for good investment targets. I highlight two important economic forces in the model. First, investors can only observe a limited number of quotes. Second, a surplus cannot be created until a fundraiser attracts contributions from enough investors. I show that in the presence of search friction, fundraisers implement mixed strategies to set interest rates in a unique stationary equilibrium, which results in rate dispersion even if the goods are homogeneous. Regarding resource allocation, I show that in the many-to-one market, rate dispersion creates an endogenous coordination mechanism among anonymous and independent investors, thereby making it easy for them to concentrate their investments. In other words, search friction improves allocation efficiency in a crowdfunding market compared with its perfect competition counterpart. Based on the theoretical framework constructed in the first chapter, the second chapter empirically studies the market structure of the crowdfunding market. I construct a novel data set based on a large panel of fundraisers' behaviors. Using reduced form analysis, I find evidence of persistent rate dispersion and funding mismatches, which are consistent with the theoretical predictions of the search model. I also show that the model is identifiable and can be estimated using a non-parametric approach, which allows me to measure the allocation efficiency. Regarding methodology, I demonstrate that it is sufficient to use projects' ranks to recover search friction primitives, which reduces the computational burden and increases the precision. The third chapter studies how the combination of adverse selection and moral hazard affects the design of financial contracts. Specifically, the chapter studies an optimal mechanism design problem,a la Mussa and Rosen (1978), in the presence of limited enforcement. In the study, the bank (principal) designs loan contracts to screen firms (agents) with unobserved productivities. Meanwhile, the bank cannot prevent the firm from consuming acquired funds without producing anything. The impediment of forming contracts creates an endogenous outside option for all borrowers. I show that in the optimal mechanism, loan sizes for higher types are decreased by ironing, i.e., by pooling on the top. In addition, the lower types produce at the second-best level. Moreover, I show that firms' participation is independent of the enforcement level.

Three Essays on Industrial Organization and International Finance

Three Essays on Industrial Organization and International Finance
Author: Mohammad Hossein Rahmati
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012
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ISBN:

What motivates mergers in banking? The data show that merger activity is concentrated among very large banks. A large literature on the banking structure has studied this question by estimating cost functions and has provided mixed evidence. A crucial assumption is the exogeneity of input prices. If this assumption fails, result may be biased. This paper adopts the production function method proposed by Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) to separate the impact of productivity from scale economies in banking. To avoid this bias, I use recovery rates of non-performing loans, charge off rates, and cash holdings as proxies for productivity. The proxy method illustrates that the industry operates with significant diseconomies of scale, while the OLS method generates opposite results. Therefore, this finding supports the view that improvements in productivity cause mergers, which is also consistent with data. Finally, I introduce the Quantile Proxy Method to capture the impacts of both input endogeneity and size heterogeneity. This method reveals that medium size banks have largest diseconomies of scale, while top 5% experience somewhat extensive economies of scale. This result sheds light on the fact why many mergers occur among large banks: large parties involved in a consolidation benefit from both productivity improvements and scale economies.

Essay in Empirical Industrial Organization and Public Finance

Essay in Empirical Industrial Organization and Public Finance
Author: Daniel Grodzicki
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014
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This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first two chapters investigate competition in the U.S. credit card market. The first looks at broad changes in the market's competitive environment over the past two decades. More specifically, it establishes how the classical facts characterizing a failure of competition in credit card lending during the 1980s are largely reversed in the decades following. Extending previous theories of limited competition in credit card lending, it illustrates how many of these changes can be explained by considering the role of costly screening in mitigating adverse selection. The second chapter studies more directly how issuers compete in today's market. To this end, it presents an equilibrium model of credit card issuers' mail out decisions and estimates it using data on direct mail credit card offers. In contrast to previous work, the model accounts for the complexity of card products, for heterogeneity in individuals' tastes for cards, and for differences in how profitable consumers are to issuers. It then explores the equilibrium supply effects of changes in the market environment. Specifically, it shows that an increase in the cost of funds (Treasury rate) unambiguously reduces consumers' propensity to receive offers and the range of rates on offers received. Conversely, reducing sending costs unambiguously increases the number and variety of offers. It also leads to an increase in the average rate on offered products. Adding a competitor on net increases the propensity to receive credit. However, it also deters existing competitors from making offers to some individuals whom they might have otherwise found profitable. The third chapter looks at the potential effects of differing methods for taxing inter-generational wealth transfers. Using wealth data on U.S. households, it forecasts changes in household wealth in the coming decade and calculates the importance of untaxed wealth in bequeathed estates. It then compares the aggregate and distributional effects of the current estate tax to those in which only the unrealized capital gains are subject to tax. It estimates that, in the coming decade, policies taxing capital gains can potentially raise more revenue than the current estate tax, but not without a substantial increase in the fraction of households facing a tax. Moreover, modest increases in capital gains allowance is likely to both sharply reduce total revenue and focus the burden of the tax on high wealth households.

Essays on Empirical Industrial Organization and Real Estate Finance

Essays on Empirical Industrial Organization and Real Estate Finance
Author: Chao Ma
Publisher:
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2015
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In the third chapter, I build a model mixing the static demand of business airline travelers and the dynamic demand of tourism travelers, and develops the econometric methodology to estimate the model using market level data where the proportions of tourism travelers and business travelers and the distribution of the time since the last tourism travel in the population of the market is also not observed. It combines three well known econometric methodologies together: BLP which estimated static demand models using market level data; Hendel and Nevo (2006) which estimated dynamic demand models with unobserved distributions of inventory levels; and Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (2004) (the micro BLP) which made use of additional micro individual level data from surveys to construct more moment conditions.