We empirically study how the underlying riskiness of the pool of home equity line of credit originations is affected over the credit cycle. Drawing from the largest existing database of U.S. home equity lines of credit, we use county-level aggregates of these loans to estimate panel regressions...

We use primary data compiled from the field in 34 randomly selected villages in Bangladesh to examine the role of bank-borrower relationships in the application and approval stages of microcredit. We find evidence that potential borrowers who have maintained membership for a long time, and who...

This paper shows that positive correlation between project outcomes may improve the efficiency of microfinance group lending contracts.

In the crisis that started in 2007, banks’ off-balance sheet activity has been blamed for flooding the market with low-quality assets and contributing to spreading risk throughout the economic system. Nevertheless, this view is hardly sustainable within the context of sophisticated markets....

We analyze the incentives for information disclosure in financial markets. We show that borrowers may have incentives to voluntarily withhold information and that doing so is most attractive for claims that are inherently hard to value, such as portfolios of subprime mortgages. Interestingly,...

This paper examines the conditions for credit volume or borrower rationing in a competitive credit market in which the project characteristics are private information of the borrowers. There can only be credit volume rationing if the higher-risk credit applicants have a higher return in the...

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...

In this paper we show that the equilibrium in the Stiglitz-Weiss model (Stiglitz and Weiss, 1981) is a two-interest rate equilibrium. For this we use the true return-function for banks shown by Arnold (2005), the assumption of Bertrand competition and make a consideration for a discrete number...

This paper presents a theory for Islamic venture capital namely ‘Mudharabah’ contract under adverse selection problem. In order to avoid selecting a low type entrepreneur for a given good project, the framework defines the profit sharing ratio (PSR) as a screening device. We then develop a...

We measure the consequences of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the Italian lending market. We show that banks' optimal price response to an increase in adverse selection varies with competition. Exploiting matched data on loans and defaults, we estimate models of demand for...