This chapter provides new evidence on borrowers' hidden information about their riskiness and its link to their impatience. To do so, I analyze consumer loans on the German platform Smava, which has a unique peer-to-peer lending process. Observationally identical but unobservably riskier...

Market distress can be the catalyst of a deleveraging wave, as in the 2007/08 financial crisis. This paper demonstrates how market distress and deleveraging can fuel each other in the presence of adverse selection problems in asset markets. At the core of the detrimental feedback loop is agents'...

Within a framework of debt renegotiation and a priori private information, what is the role of outside and inside collateral? The literature shows that unobservability of the project’s returns implies that the high-risk borrower is more inclined to pledge outside collateral than is the...

Credit rationing and the use of collateral are widely observed in debt financing. To our view there is yet no appropriate theoretical explanation for these facts. In the standard debt financing models the occurrence of credit rationing can be explained based on suitable assumptions. But those...

Banks provide risky loans to firms which have superior information regarding the quality of their projects. Due to asymmetric information the banks face the risk of adverse selection. Credit Value-at-Risk (CVaR) regulation counters the problem of low quality, i.e. high risk, loans and therefore...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...

We explore Lithuanian credit register data and two bank closures to provide a novel estimate of firms' bank-switching costs and a novel identification of the hold-up problem. We show that when a distressed bank's closure forced firms to switch, these firms started borrowing at lower interest...

We focus on the determinants and potentially associated benefits of relationship banking. Based on existing literature and the unique role intangible assets might play regarding asymmetric information, we derive three testable predictions. Using rich data on firm-bank relationships in Germany,...