We model the economic incentives surrounding opium crop production in Afghanistan. Specifically, we examine the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, and when the crops are produced in sharecropping arrangements. The analysis suggests that when perfect...

This paper develops a two-country multi-frictional model where the freeze on liquidity access to commercial banks in one country raises unemployment rates via credit rationing in both countries. The expenditure-switching channel, whereby asymmetric monetary shocks traditionally lead to negative...

This paper discusses the role played by NY Fed economist Robert Roosa and Paul Samuelson in the emergence of the literature on credit rationing at the beginning of the 1950s. I argue that, contrary to the story one can find in the technical surveys, an intermediate step between Roosa and the...

Does the Church Tower Principle, i.e. geographical proximity between borrowing firm and lending bank, matter in credit risk management? If so, the bank might expose itself to a greater risk by lending to distant firms and should therefore respond by rationing them harder. In this paper we...

We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign debt model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment...