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Private Information (private + information)
Selected AbstractsThe Effect of Private Information and Monitoring on the Role of Accounting Quality in Investment Decisions,CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 1 2010ANNE BEATTY First page of article [source] Regulating a Monopolist with Unknown Demand: Costly Public Funds and the Value of Private InformationJOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 5 2004Iñaki Aguirre In this paper, we analyze the optimal regulation policy when the regulated firm has better information concerning the market demand than the regulator. We show that introducing a cost on public funds into the Planner's objective function does not lead to qualitative results similar to those obtained by introducing distributional considerations. In particular we show that under constant marginal cost the full information policy is not implementable and that the optimal regulatory policy results in informational rents. The social value of private information and the firm's informational rents are both increasing functions of the cost of the public funds. [source] On the Revelation of Private Information in the U.S. Crop Insurance ProgramJOURNAL OF RISK AND INSURANCE, Issue 4 2007Alan Ker The crop insurance program is a prominent facet of U.S. farm policy. The participation of private insurance companies as intermediaries is justified on the basis of efficiency gains. These gains may arise from either decreased transaction costs through better established delivery channels and/or the revelation of private information. We find empirical evidence suggesting that private information is revealed by insurance companies via their reinsurance decisions. However, it is unlikely that such information will be incorporated into subsequent premium rates by the government. [source] Accounting Recognition, Moral Hazard, and Communication,CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 3 2000PIERRE JINGHONG LIANG Abstract Two complementary sources of information are studied in a multiperiod agency model. One is an accounting source that partially but credibly conveys the agent's private information through accounting recognition. The other is an unverified communication by the agent (i.e., a self-report). In a simple setting with no communication, alternative labor market frictions lead to alternative optimal recognition policies. When the agent is allowed to communicate his or her private information, accounting signals serve as a veracity check on the agent's self-report. Finally, such communication sometimes makes delaying the recognition optimal. We see contracting and confirmatory roles of accounting as its comparative advantage. As a source of information, accounting is valuable because accounting reports are credible, comprehensive, and subject to careful and professional judgement. While other information sources may be more timely in providing valuation information about an entity, audited accounting information, when used in explicit or implicit contracts, ensures the accuracy of the reports from nonaccounting sources. [source] Noncontractible Heterogeneity in Directed SearchECONOMETRICA, Issue 4 2010Michael Peters This paper provides a directed search model designed to explain the residual part of wage variation left over after the impact of education and other observable worker characteristics have been removed. Workers have private information about their characteristics at the time they apply for jobs. Firms value these characteristics differently and can observe them once workers apply. They hire the worker they most prefer. However, the characteristics are not contractible, so firms cannot condition their wages on them. This paper shows how to extend arguments from directed search to handle this, allowing for arbitrary distributions of worker and firm types. The model is used to provide a functional relationship that ties together the wage distribution and the wage,duration function. This relationship provides a testable implication of the model. This relationship suggests a common property of wage distributions that guarantees that workers who leave unemployment at the highest wages also have the shortest unemployment duration. This is in strict contrast to the usual (and somewhat implausible) directed search story in which high wages are always accompanied by higher probability of unemployment. [source] The Optimal Degree of Discretion in Monetary PolicyECONOMETRICA, Issue 5 2005Susan Athey How much discretion should the monetary authority have in setting its policy? This question is analyzed in an economy with an agreed-upon social welfare function that depends on the economy's randomly fluctuating state. The monetary authority has private information about that state. Well designed rules trade off society's desire to give the monetary authority discretion to react to its private information against society's need to prevent that authority from giving in to the temptation to stimulate the economy with unexpected inflation, the time inconsistency problem. Although this dynamic mechanism design problem seems complex, its solution is simple: legislate an inflation cap. The optimal degree of monetary policy discretion turns out to shrink as the severity of the time inconsistency problem increases relative to the importance of private information. In an economy with a severe time inconsistency problem and unimportant private information, the optimal degree of discretion is none. [source] Moral Hazard Contracting and Private Credit MarketsECONOMETRICA, Issue 3 2004In-Uck Park This paper studies the impact of credit markets on optimal contracting, when the agent's "interim preference" over upcoming contracts is private information because personal financial decisions affect it via the wealth effect. The main result is a severe loss of incentive provision: equilibrium contracts invariably cause the agent to shirk (i.e., exert minimal effort) if the agent's private financial decision precedes moral hazard contracting. The basic intuition is that committing on another private variable, other than the effort level, exposes the parties to further exploitation of efficient risk-sharing by relaxing the incentive constraint that was binding ex ante, unless the risk-sharing was fully efficient to begin with. [source] Single Crossing Properties and the Existence of Pure Strategy Equilibria in Games of Incomplete InformationECONOMETRICA, Issue 4 2001Susan Athey This paper analyzes a class of games of incomplete information where each agent has private information about her own type, and the types are drawn from an atomless joint probability distribution. The main result establishes existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria (PSNE) under a condition we call the single crossing condition (SCC), roughly described as follows: whenever each opponent uses a nondecreasing strategy (in the sense that higher types choose higher actions), a player's best response strategy is also nondecreasing. When the SCC holds, a PSNE exists in every finite-action game. Further, for games with continuous payoffs and a continuum of actions, there exists a sequence of PSNE to finite-action games that converges to a PSNE of the continuum-action game. These convergence and existence results also extend to some classes of games with discontinuous payoffs, such as first-price auctions, where bidders may be heterogeneous and reserve prices are permitted. Finally, the paper characterizes the SCC based on properties of utility functions and probability distributions over types. Applications include first-price, multi-unit, and all-pay auctions; pricing games with incomplete information about costs; and noisy signaling games. [source] European Momentum Strategies, Information Diffusion, and Investor ConservatismEUROPEAN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2005John A. Doukas G1; G11; G14 Abstract In this paper we conduct an out-of-sample test of two behavioural theories that have been proposed to explain momentum in stock returns. We test the gradual-information-diffusion model of Hong and Stein (1999) and the investor conservatism bias model of Barberis et al. (1998) in a sample of 13 European stock markets during the period 1988 to 2001. These two models predict that momentum comes from the (i) gradual dissemination of firm-specific information and (ii) investors' failure to update their beliefs sufficiently when they observe new public information. The findings of this study are consistent with the predictions of the behavioural models of Hong and Stein's (1999) and Barberis et al. (1998). The evidence shows that momentum is the result of the gradual diffusion of private information and investors' psychological conservatism reflected on the systematic errors they make in forming earnings expectations by not updating them adequately relative to their prior beliefs and by undervaluing the statistical weight of new information. [source] The Impact of Regulation FD on Institutional Investor InformativenessFINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2010Douglas O. Cook Although there is conflicting evidence and resulting skepticism regarding the value provided by professional investment management, Gibson, Safieddine, and Sonti (2004) document institutional investor informativeness relative to seasoned equity offering (SEO) purchases. We find that Regulation Fair Disclosure's significantly reduces institutional investors' ability to identify mispriced SEO firms. Informativeness is diminished not by investors following analysts who have experienced a reduction in forecasting accuracy, but limiting investors' direct access to private information. This information loss is replaced by reliance on a greater number of public information variables resulting in less consideration for prudence proxies and a liquidity motive and more for higher price momentum. [source] Ratings Changes, Ratings Levels, and the Predictive Value of Analysts' RecommendationsFINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2010Brad M. Barber We show that abnormal returns to analysts' recommendations stem from both the ratings levels assigned and the changes in those ratings. Conditional on the ratings change, buy and strong buy recommendations have greater returns than do holds, sells, and strong sells. Conditional on the ratings level, upgrades earn the highest returns and downgrades the lowest. We also find that both ratings levels and changes predict future unexpected earnings and the associated market reaction. Our results imply that 1) investment returns may be enhanced by conditioning on both recommendation levels and changes; 2) the predictive power of analysts' recommendations reflects, at least partially, analysts' ability to generate valuable private information; and 3) some inconsistency exists between analysts' ratings and the formal ratings definitions issued by securities firms. [source] Circuit Breakers with Uncertainty about the Presence of Informed Agents: I Know What You Know , I ThinkFINANCIAL MARKETS, INSTITUTIONS & INSTRUMENTS, Issue 3 2005by Lucy F. Ackert This study conducts experimental asset markets to examine the effects of circuit breaker rules on market behavior when agents are uncertain about the presence of private information. Our results unequivocally indicate that circuit breakers fail to temper unwarranted price movements in periods without private information. Agents appear to mistakenly infer that others possess private information, causing price to move away from fundamental value. Allocative efficiencies in our markets are high across all regimes. Circuit breakers perform no useful function in our experimental asset markets. [source] An Examination of the Differential Impact of Regulation FD on Analysts' Forecast AccuracyFINANCIAL REVIEW, Issue 1 2006Scott Findlay G14; G18; G24; G38 Abstract Regulation fair disclosure (FD) requires companies to publicly disseminate information, effectively preventing the selective pre-earnings announcement guidance to analysts common in the past. We investigate the effects of Regulation FD's reducing information disparity across analysts on their forecast accuracy. Proxies for private information, including brokerage size and analyst company-specific experience, lose their explanatory power for analysts' relative accuracy after Regulation FD. Analyst forecast accuracy declines overall, but analysts that are relatively less accurate (more accurate) before Regulation FD improve (deteriorate) after implementation. Our findings are consistent with selective guidance partially explaining variation in the forecasting accuracy of analysts before Regulation FD. [source] Are active fund managers collectors of private information or fast interpreters of public information?ACCOUNTING & FINANCE, Issue 3 2010David R. Gallagher G23 Abstract Recent studies of fund manager performance find evidence of outperformance. However limited research exists as to whether such outperformance is because of privately collected information, or merely expedient interpretation of publicly released information. In this study, we examine the trade sequences of active Australian equity fund managers around earnings announcements to provide insights into the source of fund managers' superior information. We document an increased occurrence of buy-sell trade sequences around good-news earnings announcements. The evidence is consistent with fund managers having both private information about forthcoming good-news earnings announcements and being ,short-term profiteers'. We find no evidence that fund managers have private information about forthcoming bad-news earnings announcements. However, we do find an increase in the frequency of fund managers not trading before bad-news earnings announcements only to subsequently sell during announcements. [source] Knowledge transfer in project reviews: the effect of self-justification bias and moral hazardACCOUNTING & FINANCE, Issue 1 2009Mandy M. Cheng M40 Abstract In this study, we examine two factors that impact managers' willingness to share private information during the project review stage of capital budgeting. Drawing on the cognitive dissonance theory and the agency theory, we find that both high perceived personal responsibility and the use of project reviews for performance evaluation result in a greater tendency for managers to withhold negative private information. However, we do not find an interaction between these two factors. Our study makes a contribution to both the academic literature investigating factors affecting project reviews and the practitioner literature looking at design and implementation of effective project reviews. [source] SCREENING ETHICS WHEN HONEST AGENTS CARE ABOUT FAIRNESS*INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 1 2006Ingela Alger A principal faces an agent with private information who is either honest or dishonest. Honesty involves revealing private information truthfully if the probability that the equilibrium allocation chosen by an agent who lies is small enough. Even the slightest intolerance for lying prevents full ethics screening whereby the agent is given proper incentives if dishonest and zero rent if honest. Still, some partial ethics screening may allow for taking advantage of the potential honesty of the agent, even if honesty is unlikely. If intolerance for lying is strong, the standard approach that assumes a fully opportunistic agent is robust. [source] The Optimal Timing of Procurement Decisions and Patent Allocations,INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 4 2002Motty Perry In a patent race, social incentives and private incentives may sometimes coincide and at other times diverge , too many researchers remain in the race. If the social planner cannot determine what stage the researchers have achieved, this informational constraint can result in a socially suboptimal outcome. We construct a mechanism in which a planner exploits the researchers' private information to determine when and to whom to allocate rights to pursue the final prize. This mechanism does not require any payments and, therefore, will not distort earlier investment incentives. It is solvable by the iterative elimination of dominated strategies. [source] Asymmetric information, price discovery and macroeconomic announcements in FX market: do top trading banks know more?INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FINANCE & ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2010Kate Phylaktis Abstract This study investigates information asymmetry in the foreign exchange market by testing the hypothesis that top trading banks possess superior information on the macroeconomy because they process greater order flow, which, according to the micro-structure literature, helps them aggregate the dispersed information and feel the general movements of the economy. Examining the information share of the banks in the Reuters EFX system using indicative GBP,$US data over 5 years, we find that the top 10 banks, out of 100 quoting banks in the market, have a monthly average share of over 70% of total market information, and around 80% during some US macroannouncements. These results suggest the possibility of private information over public news in the foreign exchange market. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] On the Information Content of Bank Loan-loss Disclosures: A Theory and Evidence from JapanINTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF FINANCE, Issue 1 2000Scott Gibson We develop a model in which banks use loan-loss disclosures to signal private information about the credit quality of their loan portfolios. The cross-sectional predictions generated by the model are shown to help to explain previously documented counterintuitive empirical regularities for US banks. We also take advantage of a recent Japanese regulatory policy shift, which first forbade the reporting of restructured loan balances and then forced full disclosure. This policy shift allows us to address a common difficulty in testing signalling theories, in that we are able to construct a timely proxy for the private information that we allege is being signalled. Consistent with our signalling model, we find that banks taking the largest write-offs turn out later to be the strongest banks, with the fewest restructured loans. [source] Grasping the Commercial Institutional PeaceINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2003David H. Bearce While the commercial institutional peace research program provides empirical evidence that international institutions, especially preferential trade arrangements, help reduce the incidence of militarized inter-state conflict, it fails to delineate clearly how such institutions matter. Building from the logic that low opportunity costs for fighting, private information, and commitment problems constitute important causes of war, this article explores three interrelated causal mechanisms. First, the state leaders' increased expectations about future commerce create an incentive for these actors to consider peaceful bargains as an alternative to costly war. Second, security coordination under the umbrella of a commercial institution provides fuller information about state military capabilities, thus making inter-state bargaining for dispute resolution more efficient. Third, in bringing together high-level state leaders on a regular basis, commercial institutions may create the trust necessary to overcome commitment problems in inter-state bargaining. I explore how these mechanisms have operated within the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Economic Community of West African States. [source] Does Greater Firm-Specific Return Variation Mean More or Less Informed Stock Pricing?JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 5 2003Artyom Durnev ABSTRACT Roll [1988] observes low R2 statistics for common asset pricing models due to vigorous firm-specific return variation not associated with public information. He concludes that this implies "either private information or else occasional frenzy unrelated to concrete information"[p. 56]. We show that firms and industries with lower market model R2 statistics exhibit higher association between current returns and future earnings, indicating more information about future earnings in current stock returns. This supports Roll's first interpretation: higher firm-specific return variation as a fraction of total variation signals more information-laden stock prices and, therefore, more efficient stock markets. [source] High-Technology Intangibles and Analysts' ForecastsJOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 2 2002Orie E. Barron This study examines the association between firms' intangible assets and properties of the information contained in analysts' earnings forecasts. We hypothesize that analysts will supplement firms' financial information by placing greater relative emphasis on their own private (or idiosyncratic) information when deriving their earnings forecasts for firms with significant intangible assets. Our evidence is consistent with this hypothesis. We find that the consensus in analysts' forecasts, measured as the correlation in analysts' forecast errors, is negatively associated with a firm's level of intangible assets. This result is robust to controlling for analyst uncertainty about a firm's future earnings, which we also find to be higher for firms with high levels of internally generated (and expensed) intangibles. Given that analyst uncertainty increases and analyst consensus decreases with the level of a firm's intangible assets, we also expect and find that the degree to which the mean forecast aggregates private information and is more accurate than an individual analyst's forecast increases with a firm's intangible assets. Finally, additional analysis reveals that lower levels of analyst consensus are associated with high-technology manufacturing companies, and that this association is explained by the relatively high R&D expenditures made by these firms. Overall, our results are consistent with financial analysts augmenting the financial reporting systems of firms with higher levels of intangible assets (in terms of contributing to more accurate earnings expectations), particularly R&D-driven high-tech manufacturers. [source] Dyadic processes of disclosure and reciprocity in bargaining with communicationJOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING, Issue 1 2003Kathleen L. McGinn Abstract We offer a study revealing the mechanisms through which communication helps actual bargaining behavior outperform economic predictions. The possibility of individually strategic behavior in the presence of private information leads to game-theoretic predictions of less than full efficiency. We present a one-stage, simultaneous offers bargaining game in which buyers and sellers have independent, privately held valuations for the item being sold (i.e. a bilateral auction with two-sided private information). In three communication treatments, parties are: (a) allowed face-to-face communication prior to submitting offers; (b) allowed written communication prior to submitting offers; or (c) allowed no-communication prior to submitting offers. When parties are allowed pre-play communication, we find nearly full efficiency (98%). We examine two systematically predictable aspects of dyadic interaction,disclosure and reciprocity,to explain how negotiators achieve this efficiency. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Corporate Debt Financing and Earnings QualityJOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 5-6 2010Aloke (Al) Ghosh Abstract:, Our study establishes linkages between two extensively researched areas, debt financing and the quality of earnings. Debt can have a ,positive influence'on earnings quality because managers are likely to use their accounting discretion to provide private information about the firms' future prospects to lower financing costs. For high debt, it can also have a ,negative influence' on earnings quality as managers use accruals aggressively to manage earnings to avoid covenant violations. Using accruals quality as a proxy for earnings quality, we document a non-monotonic (curvilinear) relation between debt and earnings quality. The relationship is positive at low levels of debt and negative at high debt levels with an inflection point around 41%. Our results suggest that firms that rely heavily on debt financing might be willing to bear higher costs of borrowing from lower earnings quality because the benefits from avoiding potential debt covenant violations exceed the higher borrowing costs. [source] Reporting Frequency, Information Precision and Private Information AcquisitionJOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 1-2 2010Rick Cuijpers Abstract:, This study examines whether the choice between quarterly and semiannual reporting affects the precision of investors' information and their private information acquisition activities. In the first part of this study, we show that a firm's reporting frequency has no effect on the average precision of investors' information. However, our analysis of announcement-period price variance and share turnover shows that an increase in reporting frequency does make interim and annual financial reports a more important component of investors' information set, relative to other sources of information. In particular, the results of this analysis suggest that investors of semiannual reporters hold more precise pre-announcement information than investors of quarterly reporters. In the second part of our study, we test one explanation for this finding. We argue that an increase in a firm's reporting frequency reduces investors' incentives to acquire private information between consecutive announcement dates and, consequently, should reduce information asymmetry among investors, increase share liquidity, and stimulate trading. Consistent with this reasoning, we find that quarterly reporters have lower average bid-ask spreads and higher abnormal share turnover than semiannual reporters. [source] Financial Restatements, Cost of Debt and Information Spillover: Evidence From the Secondary Loan MarketJOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 9-10 2009Jong Chool Park Abstract:, In this paper, we investigate the effect of financial restatements on the debt market. Specifically, we focus on the secondary loan market, which has become one of the largest capital markets in the US, and ask the following: (1) whether financial restatements increase restating firm's cost of debt financing and (2) whether the information about restatements arrives at the secondary loan market earlier than at the stock market? Using 176 restatement data, we find significant negative abnormal loan returns and increased bid-ask spreads around restatement announcements. Furthermore, this negative loan market reaction is more pronounced when the restatement is initiated by either the SEC or auditors, and when the primary reason for restatement is related to revenue recognition issues. Additionally, we find restatement information arrives at the secondary loan market earlier than at the equity market, and that such private information quickly flows into the equity market. We also show that stock prices begin to decline approximately 30 days prior to the restatement announcements for firms with traded loans. However, we do not find such informational leakage for firms without traded loans. Collectively, the results of this paper suggest: (1) increased cost of debt financing after restatements and (2) superior informational efficiency of the secondary loan market to the stock market. [source] Waiving Technical Default: The Role of Agency Costs and Bank RegulationsJOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 9-10 2006Hassan R. HassabElnaby Abstract:, This paper examines whether the characteristics of banks and borrowers are associated with banks' decisions to waive violations of debt covenants. The findings suggest that banks possess sufficient private information about firms, and they use this information in their waiver decisions. Banks' decisions to waive violations vary with the borrowers' agency costs, debt features, the banks' characteristics and regulatory circumstances, and the bank-firm business relationship. There is no evidence that syndicated loans, bank structure, and adverse economic conditions are significant determinants of the waiver decision. Research findings offer valuable insight into the theoretical and practical implications of debt covenants and agency costs. [source] Regulated Managerial Insider Trading as a Mechanism to Facilitate Shareholder ControlJOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 1-2 2001Guochang Zhang This paper shows that managerial insider trading, suitably regulated, reduces information asymmetry and helps shareholders better screen corporate decisions. In a setting where a firm's manager has private information about potential projects and his preferences differ from those of shareholders, I derive a unique perfect-sequential equilibrium (Grossman and Perry, 1986) where the manager's inside information is partially revealed through his voluntary purchase of the firm's stock, and shareholders screen investment proposals based on the revealed information. However, to make information revelation credible, the manager should be required to report his trading publicly and be prohibited from making a short-term reversal of his position. [source] Market-Share Contracts with Asymmetric InformationJOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 2 2009Adrian Majumdar In this paper, a dominant firm and competitive fringe supply substitute goods to a retailer who has private information about demand. We show that it is profitable for the dominant firm to condition payment on how much the retailer buys from the fringe (market-share contracts). The dominant firm thereby creates countervailing incentives for the retailer and, in some cases, is able to obtain the full-information outcome (unlike in standard screening models, where the agent earns an information rent in the high-demand state and output is distorted in the low-demand state). Our results have implications for fidelity rebates, all-units discounts, and competition policy. Although some crowding out of the fringe may occur when demand is low, we show that market-share contracts need not be harmful for welfare. [source] Delegation, Committees, and ManagersJOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 1 2007Birger Wernerfelt Attempts to economize on decision-making time imply that groups of peers may delegate authority to a small committee of managers even though this means that the information and preferences of the uninvolved players are neglected. Decisions are more likely to be delegated to players with better information and more representative preferences. The possibility of ex post protests may force managers to take the preferences of others into account but may also give them incentives to ignore their private information. The argument may explain employees' willingness to let bosses decide, and thus throw some light on the theory of the firm. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||