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This paper isolates the causal impact of neighborhood environment on the credit outcomes of low-income borrowers by analyzing the participants of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO was a unique, large-scale experiment that offered families vouchers to move to better neighborhoods via randomized lottery. We find higher credit scores and use among those required to move to the lowest poverty areas as young children. For those who moved as adults, we find that better neighborhoods lead to a reduction of overdue debts and delinquencies, but only among those given unrestricted neighborhood choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents an unprecedented decrease in young homeownership since the Great Recession driven by regions with high house prices. Using a panel of U.S. metro areas, I calibrate an equilibrium spatial macro-finance model with overlapping generations of mobile households. The dynamics of regional housing markets is explained by an aggregate credit contraction with heterogeneous local impacts rather than by local shocks. Lower millennial income and wealth amplify its effect. The impact of subsidies to first-time buyers is dampened, because they fail to stimulate regions that suffer from larger busts. Place-based subsidies achieve larger gains. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the 1970s, U.S. mortgage lenders commonly discounted half of the wife's income in couples' joint mortgage applications. This changed with the introduction of antidiscrimination legislation in the 1970s, providing a natural experiment to study the relaxation of income-related borrowing constraints. I study the effects of the reform by estimating difference-in-differences regressions and solving a simple calibrated life cycle model. I find substantial positive effects of the reform on mortgage borrowing and homeownership rates of married couples with working wives. Moreover, I find a positive effect on married women's labor force participation, which strongly amplifies the homeownership and borrowing effects. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of financial risk cycles on business cycles, using a panel spanning 73 countries since 1900. Agents use a Bayesian learning model to form their beliefs about risk. We construct a proxy of these beliefs and show that perceived low risk encourages risk-taking, augmenting growth at the cost of accumulating financial vulnerabilities, and, therefore, a reversal in growth follows. The reversal is particularly pronounced when the low-risk environment persists and credit growth is excessive. Global risk cycles have a stronger effect on growth than local risk cycles via their impact on capital flows, investment, and debt-issuer quality. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some credit booms result in financial crises. While excessive risk-taking could plausibly explain the boom-to-bust cycle, many investors do not anticipate increasing risk. We show that credit booms may be misunderstood as being driven by high productivity because opaque bank assets disguise risk incentives. Balanced funding relative to productive prospects can sustain prudent lending (good boom), whereas funding imbalances may induce high risk exposure and boost asset prices (bad boom) or lead to asset underpricing and insufficient lending (missed boom). Rational agents drawing inference from prices make mistakes that can amplify the effect of funding imbalances and propagate risk. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents a link between bank concentration and markups in nonfinancial sectors. We exploit concentration-increasing bank mergers and variation in banks' market shares across industries and show that higher credit concentration is associated with higher markups and that high-market-share lenders charge lower loan rates. We argue that this is due to the greater incidence of competing firms sharing common lenders that induce less aggressive product market behavior among their borrowers, thereby internalizing potential adverse effects of higher rates. Consistent with our conjecture, the effect is stronger in industries with competition in strategic substitutes where negative product market externalities are greatest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test for pricing disparities in mortgage contracts using a novel data set that allows us to observe the race and ethnicity of both parties to the loan. We find that minorities pay between 3% and 5% more in fees than similarly qualified whites when obtaining a loan through the same white broker. Critically, we find that the premium paid by minorities depends on the race of the broker. We also examine recent policy changes around broker compensation rules that may not only reduce these price disparities but may also limit access to credit for minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payday loans are controversial high-cost, short-term lending products, banned in many U.S. states. But debates surrounding their benefits to consumers continue. We analyze the effects of payday loans on consumers by using a unique data set including 99% of loans approved in the United Kingdom over a two-year period matched to credit files. Using a regression discontinuity research design, our results show that payday loans provide short-lived liquidity gains and encourage consumers to take on additional credit. However, in the following months, payday loans cause persistent increases in defaults and cause consumers to exceed their bank overdraft limits. Received August 1, 2017; editorial decision June 30, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the link between the student credit expansion of the past 15 years and the contemporaneous rise in college tuition. To disentangle simultaneity issues, we analyze the effects of increases in federal student loan caps using detailed student-level financial data. We find a pass-through effect on tuition of changes in subsidized loan maximums of about 60 cents on the dollar and of about 20 cents on the dollar for unsubsidized federal loans. The effect is most pronounced for more expensive degrees and degrees offered by for-profit and 2-year institutions. Received February 23, 2017; editorial decision March 8, 2018 by Editor Wei Jiang. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper three views are considered which are traditionally associated with 'money cranks' and 'brave heretics'. The first is that the credit nature of money has macroeconomic significance. The second is that financial development can be bad for economic growth. The third is that macroeconomic models need to be explicitly monetary macroeconomic models. It is argued that in each of these three areas, there has been a recent shift in mainstream economic opinion. This suggests new opportunities for meaningful debate between heterodox and orthodox schools on money and finance. It is further argued, following Skaggs (2003), that a common meeting ground could be an 'accounting view' of economics. This is a mode of macroeconomic analysis which explicitly uses accounting definitions, identities (that credit is also debt, or that flows of a variable affect the stock of that variable) or accounting methods (e.g. decomposing different kinds of liabilities, or linking flows of liquidity to flows of transactions) to structure and direct the analysis. The accounting view is highly pluralist yet clearly defined. I discuss its applications to each of the three views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how firms’ segmentation into credit classes affects the lending standards applied by banks to small and medium enterprises over the cycle. We exploit an institutional feature of the Italian credit market that generates a discontinuity in the allocation of comparable firms into the performing and substandard classes of credit risk. In the boom period, segmentation results in a positive interest rate spread between substandard and performing firms. In the bust period, the increase in banks’ cost of wholesale funds implies that substandard firms are excluded from credit. These firms then report lower values of production and capital investments. Received January 22, 2016; editorial decision December 18, 2017 by Editor Robin Greenwood. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines debt maturity management through early refinancing, where firms retire their outstanding bonds before the due date and simultaneously issue new ones as replacements. Speculative-grade firms frequently refinance their corporate bonds early to extend maturity, particularly under accommodating credit supply conditions, leading to a procyclical maturity structure. In contrast, investment-grade firms do not manage their maturity in the same manner. I exploit the protection period of callable bonds to show that the maturity extension is not driven by unobservable confounding factors. The evidence is consistent with speculative-grade firms dynamically managing maturity to mitigate refinancing risk. Received June 6, 2016; editorial decision September 21, 2017 by Editor Philip Strahan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, as American housing markets started to decline, the government-sponsored enterprises dramatically increased their acquisitions of low FICO and high loan-to-value mortgages. By 2008, the agencies had reversed course by decreasing their high-risk acquisitions. I develop a theory in which large lenders temporarily increase high-risk activity at the end of a boom. In the model, lenders with many outstanding mortgages have incentives to extend risky credit to prop up house prices. The increase in house prices lessens the losses they make on their outstanding portfolio of mortgages. As the bust continues, lenders slowly wind down their mortgage exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money is central to production and the constitutional theory of money has emphasised its fundamentally public foundations, with flows of credit being demand-determined. Using France as a case study, this paper challenges the Law and Development framework by discussing law's constitutive role in promoting industrialisation via the mobilisation of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal monetary stabilisation in the standard New Keynesian framework usually assumes a policy loss function from outside the model. In this paper, in contrast, the objective arises directly from the model. Credit constraints and sticky nominal debt contracts imply that monetary stabilisation has asymmetric impacts depending on whether consumers are credit-constrained. The policy problem is to maximise some weighting of the expected utility of the different types of consumer. Features of optimal stabilisation are derived that do not appear to be far out of line with empirical evidence for many countries but that clearly conflict with standard loss function results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literatures on net corporate borrowing and stockbuilding by firms are both based on a simple linear-quadratic (L-Q) model, but they have been developed independently. This paper explores the possibility that a firm may jointly optimise its borrowing and stockbuilding decisions, where previous papers have imposed 'decision rule decompositions'. The resulting model is estimated using UK corporate data and demonstrates that net corporate borrowing and stockbuilding are indeed used as substitutes in production smoothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an adverse selection model where peer group systems are shown to trigger lower interest rates and remove credit rationing in the case where borrowers are uninformed about their potential partners and ex post state verification (or auditing) by banks is costly. Peer group formation reduces interest rates due to a `collateral effect', namely, cross subsidisation amongst borrowers acts as collateral behind a loan. By uncovering such a collateral effect, this paper shows that peer group systems can be viewed as an effective risk pooling mechanism, and thus enhance efficiency, not just in the full information set up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using multi-year, firm-level surveys for 53 countries, this paper explores the impact of bank competition on firms' access to finance. We find that low competition, as measured by high values on the Lerner index or Boone indicator, diminishes firms' access to finance. In addition, the impact of competition on access to finance depends on the quality and scope of credit information sharing mechanisms, and better credit information mitigates the damaging impact of low competition. Overall, our paper offers consistent international evidence that supports the market power hypothesis, which argues that market power reduces access, and rejects the information hypothesis, which suggests that low competition improves access because it allows banks to internalize the investment in building firm-specific relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade credit can serve as a collusion mechanism for competing supply chains to increase producer surplus in medium concentrated industries. We analyze theoretically how this form of financing influences retailers' behavior in the product market, study incentives to deviate, and show evidence consistent with the model's predictions. Trade credit use is inversely U shaped in industry concentration, and this pattern is more pronounced in industries more prone to collusion and when incentives to deviate are smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using household-level debt data over 2000–2012 and local variation in inequality, we show that low-income households in high-inequality regions (zip codes, counties, states) accumulated less debt relative to their income than low-income households in lower inequality regions. We also find evidence that low-income households face higher credit prices and reduced access to credit as inequality increases. We argue that these patterns are consistent with inequality tilting credit supply away from low-income households and toward high-income households, which may have long-run implications for outcomes like homeownership or entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current financial crisis appears to be a moment of epochal change, an archetypal ‘legitimation crisis’. This paper examines the impact of this collapse on one particular section of the financial markets that concerned with credit default swaps. This paper shows how and why the markets for these products expanded and why they were integral to the financial crash. The consequence of the crash was a huge loss of legitimacy for these markets. This paper examines the processes whereby this legitimacy is being reconstructed. In particular, it distinguishes between the re-establishment of pragmatic legitimacy, which is the primary concern of the market participants, and the re-establishment of broader political legitimacy, which concerns governments and regulators. It argues that these two forms of re-establishing legitimacy work in different ways and proceed at different rates. It explores the tensions to which this leads in terms of reconstructing the financial system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank–firm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their loan portfolio in at least three different ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have a high market share. Second, they also reallocate to sectors in which they are more specialized. Third, they reallocate credit toward low-risk firms. These reallocation effects are economically large. A standard deviation increase in sector market share, sector specialization, or firm soundness reduces the transmission of the funding shock to credit supply by 22%, 8%, and 10%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the issue of pervasive credit constraints among US households. There is considerable debate about the incidence of constraints and whether the observed low borrowing in some groups of the population arises from low demand or from denial of credit. Using information on unsecured borrowing from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for (1988–1993), the paper estimates credit constraints and shows how these differ with household characteristics. It finds that around 31% of households are constrained, with young college educated households being the most constrained. Moreover, the low level of borrowing observed among black households is shown to be a demand rather than a supply effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper estimates gross credit flows for the U.S. banking system between 1979 and 1999 and shows that sizable gross flows coexist at any phase of the cycle, even within narrowly defined loan categories, bank size categories, and regional units. To investigate the macroeconomic dimensions of gross credit flows, the paper studies the cyclical behaviour of aggregate credit flows and documents three key cyclical facts. First, excess credit reallocation is countercyclical: for any given rate of change of net credit, gross flows are larger in a recession than in a boom. Second, gross credit flows are highly volatile, with a cyclical volatility which appears more than an order of magnitude larger than GDP volatility. Third, credit contraction is more volatile than credit expansion. Furthermore, the behaviour of gross flows over the 1991 recession suggests that persistent and historically high credit contraction is a key feature of the relatively mild cyclical downturn. The results lend some support to aggregate models that emphasize the asymmetric behaviour of credit expansion and credit contractions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline in the share of bank credit to non-financial firms since the 1990s, relative to credit for real estate and financial asset markets, has raised concerns over economic growth and financial stability and sparked renewed interest in credit policies, instruments and institutions. We examine their theoretical case and post-war use, and trace their demise during the wider market-oriented policy reconfiguration from the 1980s. Notably, this included home ownership polices favouring mortgage markets. We then examine the empirical relationship between credit policy and credit allocation in the 1973–2005 period for 17 advanced economies. Taking account of co-integration, we present evidence that the decline of credit policies is significantly associated with a lower share of lending to non-financial firms. It may be worth revisiting the potential of credit policies to support adequate financing for goals such as innovation, industrial development and the transition to a low-carbon economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores several questions about credit booms and busts: When do credit booms occur? When do they end up in busts, and when do they not? What are the implications for different policies if curbing credit growth and/or mitigating the associated risks is an objective? We find that credit booms are often associated with financial reform and economic growth. They also tend to be more frequent in fixed exchange rate regimes. Only one in three credit boom episodes are followed by a financial crisis. These booms tend to be larger and last longer. Macroprudential tools have at times proven effective in containing booms, and more often in limiting the consequences of busts, due to the buffers they helped to build. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the allocative performance of rotating savings and credit associations (roscas), a financial institution which is observed world-wide. We develop a model in which individuals save for an indivisible good and study roscas which distribute funds using random allocation and bidding. The allocations achieved by the two types of rosca are compared with that achieved by a credit market and with efficient allocations more generally. We find that neither type of rosca is efficient and that individuals are better off with a credit market than a bidding rosca. Nonetheless, a random rosca may sometimes yield a higher Level of ex ante expected utility to prospective participants than would a credit market.

The Jaffee and Russell [1976] model of credit rationing under imperfect information and uncertainty suggests that a single-contract equilibrium will tend to occur at a point of rationing and that a multiple-contract equilibrium will likely be unstable. This paper respecifies and extends the Jaffee-Russell model to incorporate default expectations on the demand side and to consider the price of credit more appropriately to be the net (after expected default) yield rather than the contract rate. Results show rationing is not necessary in the single-contract equilibrium case, nor is an unstable equilibrium possible in the multiple-contract case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze pricing differences between U.S. and European syndicated loans over the 1992-2014 period. We explicitly distinguish credit lines from term loans. For credit lines, U.S. borrowers pay significantly higher spreads, but lower fees, resulting in similar total costs of borrowing in both markets. Credit line usage is more cyclical in the United States, which provides a rationale for the pricing structure difference. For term loans, we analyze the channels of the cross-country loan price differential and document the importance of: the composition of term loan borrowers and the loan supply by institutional investors and foreign banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a stock-flow-consistent macroeconomic model where bank profitability and bank leverage play a crucial role in the determination of firms’ liability structure. The model assumes that banks’ credit supply depends on bank profitability as well as firms’ profit–interest ratio. Our analysis suggests that a strong expansionary effect of bank profitability on credit supply tends to destabilise the economy, leading to cycles driven by the interactions between firms’ and banks’ financial behaviour. The formal framework is used to discuss Hyman Minsky’s proposal in his Stabilizing an Unstable Economy for the control over the permissible leverage ratios and payout ratios of banks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study deals with a joint multi-item replenishment problem under trade credit. Most existing studies about trade credit focus on a single-item replenishment policy. However, joint multi-item replenishment has been widely applied in many industries to take advantage of transport economies of scale. This paper extends the traditional inventory model by considering trade credit and multi-item replenishment in order to better reflect the real-world business situation. The objective is to determine the optimal replenishment schedule for each item while minimizing the total cost. Two heuristics, namely, cost balancing and extreme finding, are developed to resolve this problem. A numerical analysis illustrates the solution procedures and compares the two heuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thangam & Uthayakumar (2010, Optimal pricing and lot-sizing policy for a two warehouse supply chain system with perishable items under partial trade credit financing. Oper. Res. Int. J., 10, 133–161) investigated perishable items with limited storage capacity under a partial trade credit policy. For simplification, they used Taylor series approximations to derive their solution procedures. In our paper, we develop an exact solution procedure that avoids the problem of assuming that the deterioration rate is small, thereby improving the accuracy of the solution but more fundamentally increasing the practical relevance of the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Credit purchases of consumer goods are commonly made upon terms governed by an agreement between the lender and the seller. The puzzle that the paper addresses is the issue that in this type of purchase the lender should be jointly liable with the seller for breach of sale contract by the seller (principle of joint responsibility). We study the rationale for this principle in situations where market failure arises because consumers underestimate the risk of product failure—for example due to seller misrepresentation—and it is difficult to enforce seller responsibility. We show that joint responsibility increases welfare and reduces the incentives of sellers to misrepresent the quality of their products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper begins by arguing that the 2007/8 credit crunch does not require a fundamental re-evaluation of monetary policy. The crunch occurred because regulation was too lax, and we need to develop new and more effective tools of regulatory control. To focus on current account imbalances or mistakes in setting interest rates as a prime cause of the credit crunch is unconvincing, and has the danger of diverting attention away from the need to increase financial regulation. The current recession does require a re-evaluation of the role fiscal policy can play when interest rates hit a zero bound. An expansionary fiscal policy is required because monetary policy-makers are reluctant to promise higher future inflation, and the impact of quantitative easing is likely to be small. Although rising debt may place a limit on how much conventional fiscal policy can do, not all expansionary fiscal measures require additional borrowing. There are two important lessons for the future. First, although monetary policy should remain the primary tool to stabilize the business cycle, the combination of fiscal implementation lags and uncertainty means that some precautionary fiscal action may be appropriate during the early phase of some economic downturns. Second, to play this ‘backstop’ stabilization role effectively, a policy that results in the government debt-to-GDP ratio declining (albeit gradually and erratically) in normal times seems appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between individual banks and banking industry behaviour in credit expansion. The authors argue that the balance sheet structure of an individual bank is only partially determined by its management's decision about how aggressively to expand credit; it is also determined by the balance sheet positions of other banks. This relationship is shown explicitly by a simple disaggregation of the variables that enter into the economy-wide money multiplier. The approach taken here revives the multi-bank approach to banking analysis pioneered by Wallace and Karmel in the 1960s, which is particularly well-suited to integrating micro and macro levels in Keynesian banking analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review how technological advances and changes in regulation may shape the (future) geographical scope of banking. We first review how both physical distance and the presence of borders currently affect bank lending conditions (loan pricing and credit availability) and market presence (branching and servicing). Next we discuss how technology and regulation have altered this impact and analyse the current state of the European banking sector. We discuss both theoretical contributions and empirical work and highlight open questions along the way. We draw three main lessons from the current theoretical and empirical literature: (i) bank lending to small businesses in Europe may be characterized both by (local) spatial pricing and resilient (regional and/or national) market segmentation; (ii) because of informational asymmetries in the retail market, bank mergers and acquisitions seem the optimal route of entering another market, long before cross-border servicing or direct entry are economically feasible; and (iii) current technological and regulatory developments may, to a large extent, remain impotent in further dismantling the various residual but mutually reinforcing frictions in the retail banking markets in Europe. We conclude the paper by offering pertinent policy recommendations based on these three lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present a set of specific measures to quantify the state and evolution of financial integration in the euro area. Five key markets are considered, namely the money, corporate-bond, government-bond, credit, and equity markets. Building upon the law of one price, we have developed two types of indicators that can be broadly categorized as price-based and news-based measures. We have complemented these measures by a number of quantity-based indicators, mainly related to the evolution of the home bias. Results indicate that the unsecured money market is fully integrated, while integration is reasonably high in the government- and corporate-bond markets, as well as in the equity markets. The credit market is among the least integrated, especially in the short-term segment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The priority of secured credit has repeatedly and famously been attacked for allowing the exploitation of certain types of unsecured creditor. It has also been blamed for creating inefficiencies. This paper examines these arguments specifically as applied to this jurisdiction, and using both theoretical analysis and recent empirical data, suggests none of them can be sustained. It is argued that security is unlikely to lead to the exploitation of involuntary, ‘uninformed’, or ‘unsophisticated’ creditors, since the perverse incentives it allegedly creates for the debtor's management are likely to be outweighed by the managers' liquidation‐related costs. It is then pointed out that both exploitation‐based and inefficiency‐based attacks on the priority of secured credit depend on the assumption that secured credit is generally cheaper than unsecured credit, and further, that this is why debtors prefer to borrow on a secured rather than unsecured basis. Recent evidence from this jurisdiction is used to challenge this assumption. This has dramatic implications for the attacks on security, which are discussed. The paper concludes with the demonstration that secured credit, by inducing creditors to lend when they would not do so without being offered priority, is mutually value‐enhancing for all types of creditor, including unsecured ones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The regulations that shape the design and operations of corporations and credit and securities markets differ vastly from country to country. In addition, similar regulations are often unequally enforced in different countries. Economists still have an imperfect understanding of why these international differences exist and of whether they tend to persist over time. However, a recent strand of research has shown that some progress on these issues can be made using the approach of the new political economy, which models regulation and its enforcement as the result of the balance of power between social and economic constituencies. In this paper we offer a first assessment of the results and potential of this approach in three fields: corporate finance, banking, and securities markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deals with rural insurgency in Pennsylvania in 1787. Overview of the scarcity of money and credit in the state; Details on several provisions of its constitution.

We show that production networks are important for the transmission of unconventional monetary policy. Firms with bonds eligible for purchase under the European Central Bank's Corporate Sector Purchase Program act as financial intermediaries by extending additional trade credit to their customers. The increase in trade credit is pronounced from core countries to periphery countries and for financially constrained customers. Customers then increase investment and employment in response to the increased trade financing, whereas suppliers expand their customer base, contributing to upstream industry concentration. Our findings suggest that trade credit redistributes the effects of monetary policy across regions and firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relation between trade credit, asset prices, and production-network linkages. Empirically, firms extending more trade credit earn 7.6 |$\%$| p.a. lower risk premiums and maintain longer relationships with customers. Using a production-based model, we quantitatively explain these novel facts. Trade credit reduces the departure probability of high-quality customers, thereby reducing firms' exposures to systematic costs incurred in finding new customers. The mechanism predicts that the aggregate amount of trade credit proxies for customer-search costs and that suppliers with shorter-duration links to customers command higher expected returns. We confirm these and other novel predictions in the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reduced-form models of default that attribute a large fraction of credit spreads to compensation for credit-event risk typically preclude the most plausible economic justification for such risk to be priced, namely, a contemporaneous drop in the market portfolio. When this "contagion" channel is introduced within a general equilibrium framework for an economy comprising a large number of firms, credit-event risk premia have an upper bound of a few basis points, and are dwarfed by the contagion premium.We provide empirical evidence that indicates credit-event risk premia are less than 1 bp, but contagion risk premia are significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a market for funding real investment where valuation--meaning investors devoting resources to acquiring information about future payoffs--creates an adverse selection problem. Unlike previous models, more valuation is associated with lower market prices and so greater returns to valuation. This strategic complementarity in the capacity to do valuation generates multiple equilibria. With multiple equilibria, the equilibrium without valuation is most efficient despite funding some unprofitable investments. Switches to valuation equilibria, valuation runs, look like credit crunches. A large investor can ensure the efficient equilibrium only if it can precommit to a price and potentially, only if subsidized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine a novel, but economically important, characterization of trade credit relationships in which large investment-grade buyers borrow from their smaller suppliers. Using a matched sample of large retail buyers and their much smaller suppliers, we find that slower payment terms by large retailers are associated with lower investment at the supplier level. The effects are sharpest during periods of tight bank credit and for firms which we might otherwise characterize as financially constrained. The opportunity cost of extending credit to large buyers appears to be positive and sharply increasing in the financial frictions facing a firm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the allocation of credit in a market in which borrowers have greater information concerning their own riskiness than do lenders. It illustrates that (1) the allocation of credit is inefficient and at times can be improved by government Intervention, and (2) small changes in the exogenous risk-free interest rate can cause large (discontinuous) changes in the allocation of credit and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. These conclusions suggests a role for government as the lender of last resort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use loan-level data to examine how large international banks reduced their cross-border lending after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Country, firm, and bank fixed effects allow us to disentangle credit supply and demand and to simultaneously control for the unobserved traits of banks and the countries and firms they lend to. We document substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which different banks retrenched from the same country. Banks reduced credit less to markets that were geographically close; where they were more experienced; where they operated a subsidiary; and where they were integrated into a network of domestic co-lenders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many households in developing countries lack formal financial histories, making it difficult for firms to extend credit, and for potential borrowers to receive it. However, many of these households have mobile phones, which generate rich data about behavior. This article shows that behavioral signatures in mobile phone data predict default, using call records matched to repayment outcomes for credit extended by a South American telecom. On a sample of individuals with (thin) financial histories, this article's method actually outperforms models using credit bureau information, both within-time and when tested on a different time period. But the method also attains similar performance on those without financial histories, who cannot be scored using traditional methods. Individuals in the highest quintile of risk by the measure used in this article are 2.8 times more likely to default than those in the lowest quintile. The method forms the basis for new forms of credit that reach the unbanked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the effect of housing wealth on household indebtedness in a life-cycle framework. Exploiting longitudinal household data and temporal and geographic variation in house prices, our empirical results indicate that households respond to increases in housing wealth by significantly increasing their debt. The effect is strongest for households that are moderately leveraged, highlighting the importance of collateral constraints. Furthermore, we uncover a weaker wealth effect from house price growth for households that have faced negative shocks to income or employment. Importantly, our findings are consistent with the theoretical predictions of the life-cycle model: households increase their mortgage debt, but not their unsecured credit card debt. A novel finding is that we uncover a moderate positive wealth effect on investment loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]