Lender and Borrower as Principal and Agent

This paper provides a critical survey of some recent developments in the principal-agent approach to the relationship between lenders and borrowers. The costly state verification model of optimal debt contract is introduced and new results with respect to optimality of standard debt contracts in this model are discussed. Adverse selection in credit markets and its solution with a menu of screening contracts is described and the problems with collateral as a screening instrument are outlined. 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 international economic literature is provided.