The role of information disclosure in financial intermediation with investment risk

We study how information disclosure affects financial intermediation when the payoff to the long-term investment is risky. The analysis is based on a business-cycle version of the bank run model wherein a bank provides risk sharing to demand depositors who experience unobservable shocks to their liquidity preferences. The bank pre-commits to the precision of an interim signal regarding the payoff to the long-term investment. We examine the impact of bank disclosure on optimal risk sharing achieved by run-proof, signal-contingent demand-deposit contracts. We show that for utility functions that display non-increasing absolute risk aversion, more informative disclosure improves the ex ante risk sharing provided by financial intermediation. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.