I model financial markets that structure decision-making into discrete points separating contract offers, applications, and acceptance/denial decisions. Endogenous beliefs about applicants’ risk types emerge as the institutional process extracts private information allowing uninformed firms to infer risk qualities by comparing applications of many consumers. Endogenous beliefs and low-risk consumer behavior render truthful disclosure of transactions incentive compatible supporting a unique equilibrium robust to cream-skimming and cross-subsidizing deviations, even under Hellwig’s “secret” policy assumption. In equilibrium each type demands low-risk’s optimal pooling policy and high-risk supplement to full coverage at fair-price. Nonpassive consumers’ belief firms are sequentially rational necessary for equilibrium; lemon equilibrium with only high-risk insured possible.
1960 to 1980 doubling (21% to 41%) of black children in one-parent families emerged from 1940-to-1970 urbanization converging population toward urbanized blacks’ historically stable high rate, not post-1960 welfare liberalization or deindustrialization. Urban and rural child socializations structured different Jim Crow Era black family formations. Agrarian economic enclaves socialized conformity to Jim Crow and two-parent families; urban enclaves rebellion, male joblessness, and destabilized families. Proxying urban/rural residence at age 16 for socialization location, logistic regressions on sixties census data confirm the hypothesis. Racialized urban socialization negatively affected two-parent family formation and poverty status of blacks but not whites.
We characterize competitive equilibrium in markets (financial etc.) where price taking Bayesian decision makers screen to accept or reject applicants. Unlike signaling models, equilibrium fails to resolve imperfect information. In classical statistics terminology, some qualified applicants are rejected (type I error) and some unqualified applicants are accepted (type II error). We report three new results: i. optimal firm behavior is deduced to be a Bayesian variant of the Neyman-Pearson theorem; ii. competitive equilibrium entails screening if and only if (net of screening costs) the cost of type II errors exceed the cost of type I errors, i.e. contrary to signaling (where buyers identify more qualified applicants who self screen to differentiate themselves e.g. Stiglitz 1975), price taking firms screen to avoid lower quality sellers; iii. equilibrium groups the least attractive applicants into a single high risk assignment pool.
Depending on costs of screening, the unique equilibrium may involve complete pooling (all applicants trade at one price) or partial separation (there are m separate pools with successive pools supported by a single (rising) price and a subset of agents of different screen levels trading at that price). A screening equilibrium has and the mth secondary market entails no screening, as the most adversely selected agents are assigned to the high risk pool.
Screening induces market segmentation. Invariably secondary markets contain individuals who with better or different screening mechanisms could be accepted in the primary market. What roles traits such as ethnicity, gender, and race might assume in such decision making is relegated to subsequent research to explore the statistical theory of discrimination.