Competition for traders and risk

Michiel Bijlsma, Gijsbert Zwart and Jan Boone

No 204, CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: The financial crisis has been attributed partly to perverse incentives for traders at banks and has led policy makers to propose regulation of banks' remuneration packages. We explain why poor incentives for traders cannot be fully resolved by only regulating the bank's top executives, and why direct intervention in trader compensation is called for. We present a model with both trader moral hazard and adverse selection on trader abilities. We demonstrate that as competition on the labour market for traders intensifies, banks optimally offer top traders contracts inducing them to take more risk, even if banks fully internalize the costs of negative outcomes. In this way, banks can reduce the surplus they have to offer to lower ability traders. In addition, we find that increasing banks' capital requirements does not unambiguously lead to reduced risk-taking by their top traders.

JEL-codes: G21 G32 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties ... traders-and-risk.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Competition for traders and risk (2018)
Working Paper: Competition for traders and risk (2012)
Working Paper: Competition for Traders and Risk (2012)
Working Paper: Competition for Traders and Risk (2012)
Working Paper: Competition for Traders and Risk (2012)
Working Paper: Competition for Traders and Risk (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpb:discus:204

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CPB Discussion Paper from CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().