Venky Venkateswaran

Pledgability and Liquidity: A New Monetarist Model of Financial and Macroeconomic Activity

When limited commitment hinders unsecured credit, assets help by serving as collateral. We study models where assets differ in pledgability - the extent to which they can be used to secure loans - and hence liquidity. Although many previous analyses of imperfect credit focus on producers, we emphasize consumers. Household debt limits are determined by the cost households incur when assets are seized in the event of default. The framework, which nests standard growth and asset-pricing theory, is calibrated to analyze the effects of monetary policy and financial innovation. We show that inflation can raise output, employment and investment, plus improve housing and stock markets. For the baseline calibration, optimal inflation is positive. Increases in pledgability can generate booms and busts in economic activity, but may still be good for welfare.

Heterogeneous Information and Labor Market Fluctuations

I introduce dispersed information in a search and matching model of the labor market, where firms are hit by aggregate and idiosyncratic productivity shocks. The latter induce larger responses in recruiting activity than the former - because aggregate shocks have general equilibrium effects which partially offset the change in fundamentals. Informational frictions prevent firms from disentangling aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. With Bayesian updating, firms attribute aggregate shocks largely to idiosyncratic factors, because the latter have significantly larger variances. This misattribution translates into an increased responsiveness of employment to aggregate shocks, relative to an economy with full information. I show that in a calibrated model, this channel has quantitatively significant effects and offers a potential solution to a well-known puzzle - the inability of standard search and matching models to generate sufficient volatility in labor market variables. In particular, the model with dispersed information brings the relative volatilities of employment and market tightness very close to those observed in the data.

Screening and Adverse Selection in Frictional Markets

We incorporate a search-theoretic model of imperfect competition into a standard model of asymmetric information with unrestricted contracts. We characterize the unique equilibrium and use our characterization to explore the interaction between adverse selection, screening, and imperfect competition. We show that the relationship between an agent’s type, the quantity he trades, and the price he pays is jointly determined by the severity of adverse selection and the concentration of market power. Therefore, quantifying the effects of adverse selection requires controlling for market structure. We also show that increasing competition and reducing informational asymmetries can decrease welfare.

Market-making with Search and Information Frictions

We develop a dynamic model of trading through market-makers that incorporates two canonical sources of illiquidity: trading (or search) frictions, which imply that market-makers have some amount of market power; and information frictions, which imply that market-makers face some degree of adverse selection. We use this model to study the effects of various technological innovations and regulatory initiatives that have reduced trading frictions in over-the-counter markets. Our main result is that reducing trading frictions can lead to less liquidity, as measured by bid-ask spreads. The key insight is that more frequent trading�?or more competition among dealers�?makes traders’ behavior less dependent on asset quality. As a result, dealers learn about asset quality more slowly and set wider bid-ask spreads to compensate for this increase in uncertainty.

Frictional Investment and the Sources of Misallocation

We study a model of investment in which a number of frictions - adjustment costs, uncertainty and institutional/policy distortions - lead to capital misallocation, i.e., static marginal products are not equalized. We devise an empirical strategy to disentangle these forces using readily observable moments in firm-level data. Applying this methodology to manufacturing firms in China reveals that adjustment costs and uncertainty have signifi- cant effects on aggregate productivity but account for a only modest share of the observed dispersion in the marginal product of capital. A substantial fraction of misallocation stems from firm-specific distortions, both productivity/size-dependent as well as permanent. For large US firms, adjustment costs are relatively more salient, though permanent firm-level factors remain important. These results are robust to the presence of liquidity/financial constraints.