Bruce Ian Carlin

Public Trust, the Law, and Financial Investment

How does trust evolve in markets? What is the optimal level of regulation and how does this affect trust formation and economic growth? In a theoretical model, we analyze these questions, given the value of social capital and the potential for growth in the market. When social capital is valuable, regulation and trustfulness are substitutes. In this case, regulation may cause lower aggregate investment and decreased economic growth. When the social capital is less valuable, regulation and trustfulness may be complements. In the paper, we analyze the optimal level of regulation and highlight the novel predictions of the model.

What Does Financial Literacy Training Teach Us

The authors use data from a finance-related theme park to explore how financial education changes investment, financing, and consumer behavior. Students were assigned fictitious life situations and asked to create household budgets. Some students received a 19-hour financial literacy curriculum before going to the park, and some did not. After controlling for demographic variables, the authors show that the treatment effects of the financial literacy program are strong. Students were more frugal, delayed gratification, paid off debt faster, and relied less on credit financing after training. Students who attended training showed greater uptake of decision support that was offered in the park, which indicates that decision support and financial literacy training are complements, not substitutes.

Work Ethic, Employment Contracts, and Firm Value

We analyze how the work ethic of managers impacts a firms employment contracts, riskiness, growth potential, and organizational structure. Flat contracts are optimal for diligent managers because they reduce risk-sharing costs, but they attract egoistic agents who shirk and unskilled agents who add no value. Stable, bureaucratic firms with low growth potential are more likely to gain value from managerial diligence. Firms that hire from a virtuous pool of agents are more conservative in their investments and have a horizontal corporate structure. Our theory also yields several testable implications that distinguish it from standard agency models. Copyright (c) 2009 the American Finance Association.

Optimal Portfolio Liquidation with Distress Risk

We analyze the problem of an investor who needs to unwind a portfolio in the face of recurring and uncertain liquidity needs, with a model that accounts for both permanent and temporary price impact of trading. We first show that a risk-neutral investor who myopically deleverages his position to meet an immediate need for cash always prefers to sell more liquid assets. If the investor faces the possibility of a downstream shock, however, the solution differs in several important ways. If the ensuing shock is sufficiently large, the nonmyopic investor unwinds positions more than immediately necessary and, all else being equal, prefers to retain more of the assets with low temporary price impact in order to hedge against possible distress. More generally, optimal liquidation involves selling strictly more of the assets with a lower ratio of permanent to temporary impact, even if these assets are relatively illiquid. The results suggest that properly accounting for the possibility of future shocks should play a role in managing large portfolios.

Legal Protection in Retail Financial Markets

Given the importance of sound advice in retail financial markets and the fact that financial institutions outsource their advice services, what legal rules maximize social welfare in the market? We address this question by posing a theoretical model of retail markets in which a firm and a broker face a bilateral hidden action problem when they service clients in the market. All participants in the market are rational, and prices are set based on consistent beliefs about equilibrium actions of the firm and the broker. We characterize the optimal law within our modeling context, and derive how the legal system splits the blame between parties to the transaction. We also analyze how complexity in assessing clients and conflicts of interest affect the law. Since these markets are large, the implications of the analysis have great welfare import.

Competition and Transparency in Financial Markets

Is competition sufficient to induce transparency in financial markets? We examine this question taking into consideration that competition in financial markets frequently resembles a tournament, where superior relative performance and greater visibility are rewarded with convex payoffs. We show under fairly general conditions (i.e., model variations) that higher competition for this remuneration often makes discretionary disclosure less likely. In the limit when the market is perfectly competitive, transparency is minimized. We show that this effect may decrease efficiency and per capita welfare, particularly when it is optimal to screen all market participants to determine whether they should be allocated a scarce good. Our analysis implies, then, that competition might be unreliable as a driver of transparency and efficiency in financial markets, especially in settings where tournament-style remuneration takes place.

Millennial-Style Learning: Search Intensity, Decision Making, and Information Sharing

The growing use of online educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision making and willingness to share in the context of a personal financial decision. We find that distracting advertising curtails the time people invest in searching for the best alternative and causes worse decisions. Content geared toward giving better instructions helps to overcome this effect. Such actionable content improves both search quality and financial decisions. However, including such content may decrease sharing unless it is perceived to be sufficiently useful. As such, there is a potential risk to adding actionable content to videos. Our work has important implications for policies guiding financial literacy training, and it also has broader impact for education in the information age. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2689. This ...

Intermediaries and Trade Efficiency

Bargaining with bilateral asymmetric information is generally not efficient. In this paper, I develop a theoretical model to show that firms can recapture trade efficiency and avoid this surplus loss by adding an intermediary to the trading mechanism. This increase in total surplus motivates firms to invest in distribution channels and reseller networks. In the model, the intermediary serves as a mechanism by which firms can commit to bilaterally favorable prices and coordinate their offers during bargaining. The expected gain to the intermediary is non-negative and the intermediary never suffers an ex-post loss. This result suggests that vertical integration between a producer and a distributor may destroy value, despite its use in removing double marginalization.

Schumpeterian Competition and Financial Markets

While previous work has focused on the rewards of creative destruction, this paper explores how Schumpeterian competition affects risk. We analyze a game in a Lucas endowment economy in which non-cooperative agents compete for the rents of a consumption stream and bear the risk imposed by creative destruction. Compared to first best, the quest for oligopoly rents leads to over-investment in uncertain projects, which magnifies both the volatility of future consumption and the uncertainty about the expected growth rate of the economy. Within the context of our model, this results in spikes in the price- dividend ratio. If competition for rents is sufficiently intense, the elevated price-dividend ratio predicts negative future expected excess returns, which is consistent with the patterns typically observed during periods of marked technological change.

Asset Pricing with Disagreement and Uncertainty about the Length of Business Cycles

We study an economy with incomplete information in which two agents are uncertain and disagree about the length of business cycles. That is, the agents do not question whether the economy is growing or not, but instead continuously estimate how long economic cycles will last — i.e., they learn about the persistence of fundamentals. Learning about persistence generates high and persistent stock return volatility mostly during recessions, but also (to a smaller extent) during economic booms. Disagreement among agents fluctuates and earns a risk premium. A clear risk-return tradeoff appears only when conditioning on the sign and magnitude of disagreement. We confirm these predictions empirically.