Speaker: Zhiguo He, Associate Professor of Finance, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Date: September 10th, 2014 (Wed.)
Time: 1:30-3:00pm
Location: Building 4, Room 101
Language: English
Topic 1: Chinese Shadow Banking
Topic 2: Inefficient Investment Waves
We show that firm’s individually optimal liquidity management results in socially inefficient boom-and-bust patterns. Financially constrained firms decide on the level of their liquid resources facing cash-flow shocks and time-varying investment opportunities. Firm’s liquidity management decisions generate simultaneous waves in aggregate cash holdings, in market value of liquidity and in investment even if technology remains constant, consistently with firm-level and aggregate evidence. These investment waves are not constrained efficient in general, because the social and private value of liquidity differs. The resulting pecuniary externality affect incentives differentially depending on the state of the economy. There is often overinvestment in booms and underinvestment in recessions. In general, policies targeted to raise prices in recessions to mitigate underinvestment, make overinvestment in booms worse. However, a well designed price-support policy will increase welfare both in booms and in recessions.
About the speaker:
Zhiguo He is interested in the implications of agency frictions and debt maturities in financial markets and macroeconomics, with a special focus on contract theory. His research has been published in leading academic journals including Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics and Management Science. He was awarded the 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Economics. Before joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008, he was visiting the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University as a post-doc fellow. He was a stock analyst at the China International Capital Corporation in Beijing in 2001. In 2007, He won the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance, the Swiss Finance Institute Outstanding Paper Award and the Smith-Breeden First Prize.
