Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics:Information Acquisition and Mercantile Credit Reporting in the 19th Century U.S.

在2007-2008年金融危机之后，对信用评级机构（CRAs）的主要批评是，它们给出了有偏见的评级，导致投资者高估了结构性金融产品的价值。除了监管方面的担忧，只有在投资者了解评级并利用它们做出投资决策的情况下，有偏见的评级才会对经济产生直接的有害影响。然而，经济理论表明，如果对特殊信息的需求减少，而总回报增加，投资者可能不会在商业周期的高峰时期关注评级。一般来说，我们不知道投资者拥有什么样的信息；通常我们能做的最好的事情就是从交易行为中推断出他们的信息。这种推断是不精确的，并没有表明信息的来源。为了评估评级机构和其他信息生产者的经济重要性，我们需要更多地了解是什么决定了对其产品的需求。本文的研究旨在(1)构建一个独特的从信息生产者那里获取信息的直接度量，(2)使用该度量来确定信息需求的决定因素。本研究的主要来源是商业机构的信用报告记录。该机构成立于1841年，是首批商业信用报告公司之一，与其主要竞争对手J.M.布拉德斯特里特公司共同建立了现代信用评级体系。批发商订购这项服务是为了获得有关其贸易伙伴信用质量的信息。这些信用报告涵盖了1850年至1880年代中期几乎整个美国的商人。报告的样本将从位于哈佛商学院贝克图书馆历史馆藏的R.G.邓氏公司信用报告卷中收集。该数据集的主要变量将是信用报告的一个尚未被任何学者利用的特征：表明有多少订阅者查询了每份报告。这些数据将支持关于用户如何获取信息的两个主要研究项目。如果我们假设订户使用信用报告来做出交易决策，那么只有当他们期望这些信息会影响他们的决策时，他们才应该查询报告。第一个项目将经验性地确定订户获得最多信息的经济条件。基于小样本的初步证据表明，订阅者以反周期方式获取信息。如果这一发现在更普遍的情况下成立，那就意味着，相对于萧条时期，信息在繁荣时期的价值更低。第二个项目将调查商贸局报告的公司类型与整个市场的关系，以及这种供应如何随时间变化。如果该机构能随着时间的推移了解其订阅者的偏好，它就应该能更好地预测订阅者会发现有用的信息。因此，供应的发展可以揭示信用报告最有价值的公司的特征。通过研究商业机构的信用报告，本研究将进一步加深我们对人们如何获取信息以及产生信息的机构的经济意义的理解。本研究将通过提供一种直接的获取方法，为有关昂贵信息获取的经济学文献做出贡献，并通过研究公司运作的关键组成部分，为有关商业机构历史的文献做出贡献。

In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, a main criticism of credit rating agencies (CRAs) has been that they produced biased ratings that led investors to overvalue structured financial products. Aside from regulatory concerns, biased ratings only have direct detrimental effects on the economy if investors know the ratings and use them to make investment decisions. Nevertheless, economic theory suggests that investors might not look at ratings during business cycle peaks if demand for idiosyncratic information decreases when aggregate returns increase. In general, we don't know what information investors have; often the best we can do is infer their information from trading actions. This inference is imprecise and does not indicate the source of the information. In order to evaluate the economic importance of CRAs and other information producers, we need to know more about what determines demand for their product.This dissertation research aims to (1) construct a unique direct measure of information acquisition from an information producer and (2) use this measure to identify the determinants of demand for information.The primary sources for this research are the credit report records of the Mercantile Agency. Founded in 1841, the Agency was one of the first mercantile credit-reporting firms and, along with its main competitor, J.M. Bradstreet & Company, established the system on which modern credit rating is based. Wholesalers subscribed to the service to gain information on the credit quality of their trading partners. The credit reports cover merchants for almost the entire United States between 1850 and the mid-1880s. A sample of the reports will be collected from the R.G. Dun & Company Credit Report Volumes, located in the Baker Library Historical Collections at the Harvard Business School. The main variable for this dataset will be a feature of the credit reports that has yet to be exploited by any scholars: indications of how many subscribers inquired about each report. These data will support two main research projects about how subscribers acquired information. If we assume that subscribers used the credit reports to make trading decisions, they should only have inquired after a report if they expected the information to impact their decisions. The first project will empirically identify the economic conditions under which subscribers acquired the most information. The preliminary evidence based on a small sample suggests that subscribers acquired information counter-cyclically. If this finding holds more generally, it implies that information was less valuable in boom periods relative to bust periods. The second project will investigate what types of firms the Mercantile Agency reported on relative to the entire market and how this supply changed over time. If the Agency learned about its subscribers' preferences over time, it should have improved at predicting the information its subscribers would find useful. Hence, the development of supply can shed light on the characteristics of firms for which credit reporting was most valuable.By studying the credit reports of the Mercantile Agency, this research will further our understanding of how people acquire information and the economic significance of the institutions that produce information. This research will contribute to the literature in economics on costly information acquisition by providing a direct measure of acquisition and contribute to the literature on the history of the Mercantile Agency by studying a key component of how the company operated.