Information sharing about borrowers’ characteristics and their indebtedness can have important effects on credit markets activity. First, it improves the banks’ knowledge of applicants’ characteristics and permits a more accurate prediction of their repayment probabilities. Second, it...

We describe the operation of credit bureaus and public credit registers in Europe and extract potential lessons for upgrading credit registers in other countries. The evidence that we report is based on questionnaires directed to private credit bureaus and central banks, on direct interviews and...

In the context of an overlapping-generations model, the authors show that liquidity constraints on households (1) raise the saving rate, (2) strengthen the effect of growth on saving, (3) increase the growth rate if productivity growth is endogenous, and (4) may increase welfare. The first three...

The cost of enforcing contracts is a key determinant of market performance. We document this point with reference to the credit market in a model of opportunistic debtors and inefficient courts. According to the model, improvements in judicial efficiency should reduce credit constraints and...

The authors analyze the welfare implications of liquidity constraints for households in an overlapping generations model with growth. In a closed economy with exogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints reduce welfare if the economy is dynamically inefficient. But, if it is dynamically...

We analyze the welfare implications of liquidity constraints for households in an overlapping generations model with growth. In a closed economy with exogenous technical progress, liquidity constraints reduce welfare if the economy is dynamically inefficient. But if it is dynamically efficient,...

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. To test these predictions, we construct a new international data set on private credit bureaus and public credit registers. We find...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...

We estimate Euler equations for a number of countries and find that the excess sensitivity of consumption to current income fluctuations is higher in the countries where consumers borrow less. The low level of consumer debt in these countries can be interpreted either as a symptom of tighter...