Essays on Industrial Organization and Financial Economics

• Main Author: Tian, Xiaoye
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2021
• Subjects: Economic theory; Economics; Finance; Industrial engineering
• ISBN: 9798738622847

This dissertation explores how imperfections in financial markets affect decisions made by market participants and subsequent market outcomes. The three chapters in this dissertation focus on three different financial markets: corporate lending market for small firms in China, refinance market for residential mortgage in US and retail investment product market in China. The first chapter studies inefficiencies arising from the lack of long-term contracting between borrower (firm) and lender (bank). I draw on a proprietary data from a Chinese bank, which only offers one-year term loans for small firms. How, and to what extent can default risk be reduced if they were able to enter long-term contract? I develop a dynamic model of business lending to analyze borrower's default incentives in an environment with imperfect information and learning. Estimation of the structural model implies that over seventy percent of observed defaults are strategic borrower defaults. In the counterfactual model, banks are able to offer long-term contingent contract which involves a schedule of future lending terms that can vary with time and firm’s financial status. I find that optimal long-term contract has two main benefits: First, by frontloading prices, it alleviates agency frictions and disincentivizes willful defaults. Second, by cross-subsidization, it provides insurance for firms against negative shocks. As a result, with long-term contracting 17% fewer firms default, and total firm outputs expand by 2.6%. The second chapter (joint with Chen Zheng) studies the unintended consequences arising from program design, and how it augments the market power of incumbent lenders, in the context of a federal program called Home Affordable Refinance Program. We build a dynamic discrete choice model of refinance decision where the payoff is generated from a search and negotiation process. We estimate the model using data on program participation and pricing decision. The estimation exploits a significant change to the program design that gives exogenous variation in the competitive advantage of incumbent lenders under the program. In a counterfactual where the advantage granted by program design is shut down, we find that it leads to an average welfare improvement of 4,977. The insight from this study could apply to other policies whose implementation depends on intermediaries with incumbency advantage with respect to targeted agents. In the third chapter, I develop an empirical structural model of the wealth management sector in China in order to analyze the welfare impact of the proposed regulation aimed at ending the prevalence of the implicit guarantee in this industry. The implicit guarantee means the bank implicitly promises the returns on wealth management products to investors, and investors choose from differentiated wealth management products based on characteristics including guaranteed returns. In the counterfactual post-regulation scenario, the bank does not guarantee returns, and it only serves as an intermediary charging a constant fee, shifting the underlying risk of investment to investors. The change of consumer welfare hinges on two forces—the adjustment of the bank’s markups and investor’s disutility of risk. Empirical findings suggest that the markup decreases moderately, but not enough to completely compensate for investor’s aversion of risk, so consumer surplus drops slightly as a result of the regulation.