Lemons, Market Shutdowns and Learning Pablo Kurlat ∗ MIT Job Market Paper November 2009 Abstract I study a dynamic economy featuring adverse selection in financial markets. Investment is undertaken by borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs. They sell their past projects to finance new ones, but asymmetric information about project quality creates a lemons problem. The magnitude of this friction responds to aggregate shocks, amplifying the responses of asset prices and investment. Indeed, negative shocks can lead to a complete shutdown in financial markets. I then introduce learning from past transactions. This makes the degree of informational asymmetry endogenous and makes the liquidity of assets depend on the experience of market participants. Market downturns lead to less learning, worsening the future adverse selection problem. As a result, transitory shocks can create highly persistent responses in investment and output. (JEL E22, E44, D83, G14) ∗I am deeply indebted to George-Marios Angeletos, Ricardo Caballero, Bengt Holmstr¨om and especially Iv´an Werning for their invaluable guidance. I also thank Daron Acemoglu, Sergi Basco, Francisco Buera, Mart´ın Gonzalez-Eiras, Guido Lorenzoni, Julio Rotemberg, Jean Tirole, Robert Townsend and seminar participants at the MIT Macroeconomics Lunch, Theory Lunch and International Breakfast, the LACEA-LAMES 2009 Meeting and the Federal Reserve Board for useful suggestions and comments. All remaining errors are my own. Correspondence: Department of Economics, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02142. Email:
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction Financial markets are fragile, volatile and occasionally shut down entirely. The recent financial crisis has intensified economists’ interest in understanding the causes of financial instability and its effects on real economic variables such as investment, output and productivity.