Government Intervention and Information Aggregation by Prices

Government Intervention and Information Aggregation by Prices

Governments intervene in firms’ lives in a variety of ways. To enhance the efficiency of government intervention, many researchers and policy makers call for governments to make use of information contained in stock market prices. However, price informativeness is endogenous to government policy. We analyze government policy in light of this endogeneity. In some cases, it is optimal for a gover...

Government intervention and information aggregation by prices1

Market prices are thought to contain a lot of useful information. Hence, regulators (and other agents) are often urged to use market prices to guide decisions. An important issue to consider is the endogeneity of market prices and how they are affected by the prospect of government intervention. We show that if the government learns from the price when taking a corrective action, it might reduc...

Crises and Prices: Information Aggregation, Multiplicity, and Volatility

Crises are volatile times when endogenous sources of information are closely monitored. We study the role of information in crises by introducing a financial market in a coordination game with imperfect information. The asset price aggregates dispersed private information acting as a public noisy signal. In contrast to the case with exogenous information, our main result is that uniqueness may ...

Using Market Prices as a Guide for Government Intervention∗ (Preliminary and Incomplete)

Many policy proposals call for government intervention to be based on the information in market prices of firm securities. Most of these proposals ignore the fact that market prices are endogenous to government intervention. In particular, when the government takes a corrective action based on price, the price might become less informative. We review a few channels by which this may occur, and ...

Energy Prices and Alberta Government Revenue Volatility