Essays on Misallocation and Firm Regulations

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on misallocation and firm regulations. The first chapter investigates how size-dependent firm regulation policies can mitigate misallocation. The second chapter uses the same framework as the first to explore the intuition of a theoretically more subtle concept of misallocation. The third chapter analyzes a more specific firm regulation that targets at financial dealers. In chapter 1, I study the welfare implications of size-dependent firm regulation policies (SDPs) in the presence of entrepreneurial risks. Although SDP has been considered a source of misallocation, I show that, once entrepreneurial risks are taken into account, SDP might improve efficiency. Quantitatively, I show that, based on French data, removing the SDP leads to output and welfare loss by 1.5% and 1.3%, respectively, in opposition to the output gain reported by the previous literature that abstracts from risks. Qualitatively, I solve an optimal non-linear SDP problem and show that the observed SDP shares certain features with the optimal SDP. The analysis uncovers a novel trade-off between the inefficiencies of the intensive and extensive margins. In extension, it is shown that (1) whether SDPs improve efficiency depends on the level of financial development and (2) capital accumulation and consumption-smoothing motive further justify SDPs. In chapter 2, which is a joint work with Misaki Matsumura, we use the same competitive entrepreneurship model to investigate the economic intuition of constrained inefficiency caused by uninsurable risks. Although the constrained efficiency of various models has been studied in the literature, the economic intuition of why the constrained planner's intervention yields an improvement is usually not available. The competitive entrepreneurship model is particularly suitable for seeing the logic of constrained inefficiency since the structure of the market equilibrium is characterized by the indifference condition instead of the marginal condition. To illustrate this point, we contrast the competitive entrepreneurship model with simple versions of the Aiyagari model and the Krebs model. In chapter 3, which is also a joint work with Misaki Matsumura, we build a general equilibrium model to analyze the impact of the Volcker rule, a dealer regulation imposed after the financial crisis, on price quality (informativeness and volatility) and its implications on the welfare of market participants. We argue that although price informativeness, volatility and the dealer's profitability all deteriorate, against conventional wisdom, other market participants are better off due to the dealer's risk-shifting motive. A static model is used to clarify the main intuition, and the robustness of the welfare results as well as the fragility of the conventional wisdom about price quality are discussed by incorporating dynamics and endogenizing information acquisition