Reputation and signaling in asset sales

Abstract

Static adverse selection models of security issuance show that informed issuers can perfectly reveal their private information by maintaining a costly stake in the securities they issue. This paper shows that allowing an issuer to both signal current security quality via retention and build a reputation for honesty leads that issuer to misreport quality even when owning a positive stake, that is, the equilibrium is neither separating nor pooling. An issuer retains less as reputation improves and prices are more sensitive to retention when the issuer has a worse reputation.