The Social Value of Financial Expertise
研究了信息不对称交易中专业知识获取的社会价值，提出衡量专业知识边际社会价值与边际私人价值之比的方法，并发现垃圾债券承销市场中该比值为0.16，表明边际专业知识投资会破坏社会剩余。
I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to measure r, the ratio of the marginal social value to the marginal private value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders’ average profits, the fraction of bad assets among traded assets, and the elasticity of good assets traded with respect to capital inflows. I measure r = 0.16 for the junk bond underwriting market. Since this is less than 1, it implies that marginal investments in expertise destroy surplus.