We analyze lending contracts when social sanctions are used to enforce repayments and borrowers di¤er in their unobserved sanctioning abilities. Symmetric group loans are preferred to cosigned loans when borrowers are relatively equal, and cosigned loans are preferred when borrowers are unequal. This explains why microlenders that target the poor (e.g., the Grameen Bank) use symmetric group loa...

This paper studies loan collateral and relationship banking. A firm has different loans (e.g. short-term and long-term loans) and alternative collateral assets. How does it allocate the collateral assets between the loans? It optimally secures a long-term loan with collateral that incurs high information costs initially and has a strong learning effect during the loan period (e.g. accounts rece...

This document describes the techniques used in and results of our project to apply social and information network analysis to the Kiva.org online microlending network. The Kiva network can be modeled as a set of bipartite graphs linking lenders to loans, lending teams to loans, and individual lenders to lending teams. Folding the lender-loan graph to create a graph of lenders linked by common l...

We study a controlled corporate experiment in which loan officers was altered from fixed salary to volume-based pay. The incentives increased aggressiveness of origination: higher origination rates (+31%), loan sizes (+15%), and default rate (+28%). The effects are partly driven by moral hazard: approval decision is driven by loan officers’ discretion; however, default is uncorrelated with disc...

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on Prosper and whether social networks help alleviate the information problems. As we expect, data identifi...

DRAFT Not to be distributed without permission of the authors. This work is preliminary and subject to modification. Summary This white paper provides a non-technical introduction to the Zealand Commercial Mortgage Loan Pricing Model. The accurate valuation of commercial mortgages is a complex and challenging task. The roots of this difficulty are the complex set of interacting options embedded...

Copyright (1994) This paper places a new interpretation on the traditional evolutionary account of money and banking institutions. This allows the development of a new conceptual framework for a monetary model called the Loans Standard. The Loans Standard has an institutional structure that minimizes the transaction costs of using exchange credit (i.e. money). Developments within the existing s...

This paper develops a unified theory of bank operations that integrates theories of financial intermediation, asset pricing, and production. In a simple dynamic model, banks maximize the present value of future profits generated through three categories of qualitatively distinct functions: (1) resolving information asymmetry in order to make loans, (2) providing transaction services, and (3) fi...

The failure or success of the banking industry depends largely on the industry’s ability to properly evaluate credit risk. In the consumer-lending context, the bank’s goal is to maximize income by issuing as many good loans to consumers as possible while avoiding losses associated with bad loans. Mistakes could severely affect profits because the losses associated with one bad loan may undermin...

Student loans and credit card loans represent important components of young households’ portfolios in the United States. While default rates on credit card debt are at historically low levels, default rates on student loans have increased significantly in recent years. There are important institutional differences between bankruptcy arrangements and default consequences in the two markets, whic...