We develop a model of lending and borrowing in markets where the lender has no access to physical collateral and where the borrower is heavily capital constrained. Our model of micro loans, which incorporates a) the absence of access to physical collateral, b) peer monitoring, c) threat of punishment upon default, and d) costly monitoring by lenders is used to determine the equilibrium borrowin...

We show that easier access to mortgage credit significantly increases house prices by using exogenous changes in the conforming loan limit as an instrument for easier credit supply and cheaper cost of credit. We find that houses that become eligible for financing with a conforming loan show an increase in house value of 1.1 dollars per square foot (for an average price per square foot of 224 do...

We examine whether equity volatility can explain the difference in syndicated corporate loan spreads paid by U.S. and European borrowers first documented by Carey and Nini (2007). We argue that OLS estimates of the association between equity volatility and loan spreads are biased and inconsistent. We suggest instrumental variables that potentially identify consistent estimates. Our instrumental...

I examine whether easily observable variables such as beauty, race, and the way a loan applicant presents himself affect lenders’ decisions, once hard financial information about credit scores, employment history, homeownership, and other financial information are taken into account. I use data from Prosper.com, a 150 million dollars online lending market in which borrowers post loan requests t...

This paper introduces monopolistically competitive banks into the New Keynesian DSGE setting. I find that this contributes to explaining three empirical facts: (i) The short-run transmission of changes in monetary policy to bank retail rates is far from complete and heterogeneous. Stiffer competition among commercial banks implies that (ii) retail interest rates correlate more tightly with mark...

If a bank lends you money for one year and lends money to someone else for ten years, it is very likely that the rate of interest charged for the one-year loan will differ from that charged for the ten-year loan. Term-structure theory has as its basis the idea that loans of different maturities should incur different rates of interest. This basis is grounded in reality and allows for a much ric...

The answer, according to Hume, could be the borrower’s “abhorrence of villainy and knavery”, but this could only be the case in “a civiliz’d state, when [the borrower] is train’d up according to a certain discipline and education”. This cannot be the answer, however, when the interaction is looked at from the perspective of man’s basic “rude and more natural condition”. Nor can the answer be fo...

This study investigates how the use of collateral affects incentives for borrowers and lenders and the resulting loan pricing relationship. With data from the UK Survey of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises 2008, a simultaneous equation approach reveals that high quality borrowers choose contracts with more collateral and lower interest rates, which suggests that collateral acts as an incentive...

Using unique data on the Irish loan funds, a nineteenth-century system of quasi-banks, we show that higher levels of uncontrolled capital, where there is no residual claimant, lead to higher wages. The loan funds relied on deposits, as well as donations and accumulated profits, to finance their lending. We examine the effect of different levels of deposits and capital on managerial salaries and...

The debt overhang problem is shown to arise in the context of an entrepreneurial project that requires a sequence of investments financed by an outside lender. The entrepreneur, not internalizing losses accruing to the lender which financed the initial investments, may inefficiently cancel the project and instead pursue an outside opportunity. It is shown that loan commitments (contracts that a...