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The Information View of Financial Crises

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  • Tri Vi Dang
  • Gary B. Gorton
  • Bengt R. Holmstrom

Abstract

Short-term debt that can serve as a medium of exchange is designed to be information insensitive. No one should be tempted to acquire private information to gain an informational advantage in trading that could destabilize the value of the debt. Short-term debt minimizes the incentive to acquire information among all securities of equal value backed by the same underlying asset. These features align with observed practice in money markets (markets for short-term debt). They are also consistent with financial crises occurring periodically. In the information view adopted here, financial crisis can occur when the collateral backing the short-term debt is thought to have lost enough value to raise doubts among the traders that some may acquire private information. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the burgeoning empirical literature that bears on the information view sketched above. We focus on evidence related to three key implications of information insensitive debt: (i) adjustments to external shocks will occur along non-price dimensions (less debt issued, higher haircuts, added collateral, etc); (ii) in a crisis some of the short-term debt turns information sensitive; (iii) money markets feature low transparency as well as purposeful opacity.

Suggested Citation

  • Tri Vi Dang & Gary B. Gorton & Bengt R. Holmstrom, 2019. "The Information View of Financial Crises," NBER Working Papers 26074, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26074
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Bank Runs and Panics: A Primer
      by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets on 2020-03-02 12:38:37

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    5. Larry D. Wall, 2021. "So Far, So Good: Government Insurance of Financial Sector Tail Risk," Policy Hub, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 2021(13), November.
    6. Iorgova, Silvia & Ross, Chase P., 2023. "Investor information and bank instability during the European debt crisis," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    7. Arnold, Grace E. & Rhodes, Meredith E., 2021. "Information sensitivity of corporate bonds: Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 42(C).
    8. Li, Jiaqi, 2023. "Predicting the demand for central bank digital currency: A structural analysis with survey data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 73-85.
    9. Anderson, Haelim & Copeland, Adam, 2023. "Information management in times of crisis," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 35-49.
    10. Gang Bai & Chunhui Chen, 2023. "Managing Information Sensitivity: The Relationship between the Interbank Offered Rate and the Characteristics of Bank-Issued Wealth Management Products in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(2), pages 1-19, January.
    11. Kanis Saengchote, 2022. "Decentralized lending and its users: Insights from Compound," Papers 2212.05734, arXiv.org.
    12. Gupta, Arun, 2022. "The Internal Capital Markets of Global Dealer Banks," Journal of Financial Crises, Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), vol. 4(3), pages 165-188, April.
    13. Garay Rodríguez, Seydyss & Vidal-Alejandro, Pavel & Cerón-Ordoñez, Julieth, 2023. "El monitoreo del sector de la construcción en el Valle del Cauca," Apuntes del Cenes, Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, vol. 42(75), pages 237-271, January.
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    15. Tri Vi Dang & Xiaoxi Liu & Florian Morath, 2022. "Taxation, Information Acquisition, and Trade in Decentralized Markets: Theory and Test," Working Papers 2022-08, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    16. Levent Altinoglu & Jin-Wook Chang, 2022. "Information Externalities, Funding Liquidity, and Fire Sales," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2022-052, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    17. Saengchote, Kanis, 2023. "Decentralized lending and its users: Insights from compound," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    18. Järvenpää, Maija & Paavola, Aleksi, 2021. "Investor monitoring, money-likeness and stability of money market funds," Bank of Finland Research Discussion Papers 2/2021, Bank of Finland.
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    20. Järvenpää, Maija & Paavola, Aleksi, 2021. "Investor monitoring, money-likeness and stability of money market funds," Research Discussion Papers 2/2021, Bank of Finland.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D53 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Financial Markets
    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

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