An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

We test the implications of Flannery’s (1986) and Diamond’s (1991) models concerning the effects of risk and asymmetric information in determining debt maturity, and we examine the overall importance of informational asymmetries in debt maturity choices. We employ data from more than 6,000...

U.S. commercial banks are increasingly using credit scoring models to underwrite small business credits. This paper discusses this technology, evaluates the research findings on the effects of this technology on small business credit availability, and links these findings to a number of research...

The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

I model multimarket competition when consumers value firm scope across markets. Such competition is surprisingly common – consumers in many industries prefer firms that operate in more geographic and/or product markets. I show that these preferences permit firms of differing scopes to coexist...

The relationship between gasoline prices and the demand for vehicle fuel efficiency is important for environmental policy but poorly understood in the academic literature. We provide empirical evidence that automobile manufacturers price as if consumers respond to gasoline prices. We derive a...

We model competition between two firms in a vertical upstream-downstream relationship. Each firm can pay a sunk cost to enter the other’s market. For equilibria in which both firms enter, the downstream price can be lower than the joint profit maximizing level, and coordination (e.g., through...

We model a "new economy" industry where innovation is sequential and monopoly is persistent but the incumbent turns over periodically. In this setting we analyze the effects of "extraction" (e.g., price discrimination that captures greater surplus) and "extension" (conduct that simply delays...