Agency Theory Approach to the Contracting between Lender and Borrower

The paper provides an overview of several selected topics dealing with application of agency theory to the credit contracts. The costly state verification and costly punishment models of optimal debt contracts are introduced and compared with respect to their performance in the situation characterized by risk aversion. Adverse selection in credit markets and its solution with a menu of screening contracts is described and the use of collateral as a screening instrument is discussed. The dynamic relationship between the lender and borrower is introduced in a soft budget constraint model of default and bankruptcy decisions. Alternative assumptions about informational asymmetries in credit markets are presented as well. For all these topics a number of references from Czech and iternational economic literature is provided.