We examine how the banking sector may ignite the formation of assetprice bubbles when there is access to abundant liquidity. Inside banks,given lack of observability of effort, loan officers (or risk takers)are compensated based on the volume of loans but are penalized if bankssuffer a high...

Recovery rates are negatively related to default probabilities (Altman et al., 2005). This paper proposes and estimates a model in which this dependence is the result of an unobserved credit cycle: When times are bad, the default probability is high and recovery rates are low; when times are...