Since bank deposits and currency are substitutes and banks have monopoly power, higher nominal interest rates lead to higher deposit spreads. This raises the cost of transaction services, increases bank profits and attracts entry into the banking sector. Taking these effects into account, a one...

In canonical models with financial constraints, the possibility of fire sales creates a pecuniary externality that results in ex-ante overinvestment. I show that this result is sensitive to the microfoundations for fire sales. If they result from asymmetric information instead of misallocation,...

I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to estimate the ratio of social to private marginal value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders' average profits, the fraction of bad assets...

This paper proposes a theory of liquidity dynamics. Illiquidity results from asymmetric information. Observing the historical track record teaches agents how to interpret public information and helps overcome information asymmetry. There can be an illiquidity trap: too much asymmetric...