We study an economy with financial frictions in which a regulator designs a test that reveals outside information about a firm's quality to investors. The firm can also disclose verifiable inside information about its quality. We show that the regulator optimally aims for “public speech and private silence,” which is achieved with tests that give insiders an incentive to stay quiet. We fully characterize optimal tests by developing tools for Bayesian persuasion with incentive constraints, and use these results to derive novel guidance for the design of bank stress tests, as well as benchmarks for socially optimal corporate credit ratings.

中文翻译：

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内部和外部信息


我们研究一个存在金融摩擦的经济体，其中监管机构设计了一项测试，向投资者揭示有关公司质量的外部信息。该公司还可以披露有关其质量的可验证的内部信息。我们表明，监管机构的最佳目标是“公开言论和私人沉默”，这是通过激励内部人士保持沉默的测试来实现的。我们通过开发具有激励约束的贝叶斯说服工具来充分描述最佳测试的特征，并利用这些结果为银行压力测试的设计以及社会最佳企业信用评级的基准得出新颖的指导。