We show that firms intermediating trade have incentives to overinvest in financial expertise, and that these investments can be destabilizing. Financial expertise in our model improves firms' ability to accurately estimate value when trading a security. It creates adverse selection, which under...

We propose a model in which firms involved in trading securities overinvest in financial expertise. Intermediaries or traders in the model meet and bargain over a financial asset. As in the bargaining model in Dang (2008), counterparties endogenously decide whether to acquire information, which...