As interlibrary loan (ILL) becomes an increasingly used resource sharing mechanism for the exchange of books and periodicals, libraries have embraced new technologies to better manage ILL activities. While many efficiencies have been gained through the use of computers and telecommunication networks, the proliferation of telecommunication options, ILL systems and non-standard message formats ha...

It is commonly argued that banks play a special role in the financial system because they resolve an important information asymmetry. The recent development of an active secondary market for loans could however potentially diminish this special role. This study utilizes a unique dataset of secondary market loan prices to examine this issue. We find that new loan announcements are associated wit...

We study the effects of usury limits on the market for auto loans and find little evidence of credit rationing. We show instead that loan contracting and the organization of the loan market adjust to facilitate loans to risky borrowers. When usury restrictions bind, auto dealers finance their customers’ purchases and raise the vehicle sales price (and loan amount) relative to the value of the u...

We investigate the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with banks’ evergreening loans, distinguishing between two types of firm distress: (perhaps temporary) financial distress and technical distress, which reflects weak operational capabilities, as indicated by low total factor productivity. We show that previous evidence related to firms’ financial health is problematic...

I examine loan data from Prosper.com—a website which allows borrowers to post loans and for lenders to bid on those loans. The Prosper market somewhat resembles the theoretical model of search, herding, and crowding in a large market described in Berkovich and Tayon (2009). That model predicts that assets with high and low prices have high variance in the difference between price and true value...

Chinese banks suffer from serious financial fragility manifested by high proportions of non-performing loans and low capital-adequacy ratios. A key policy introduced recently by the Chinese government to reduce financial risks is the establishment of four asset management companies (AMCs) for dealing with bad loans. Drawing on the experiences of the Resolution Trust Corporation in the United St...

We estimate Japanese banking inefficiency and the shadow price of problem loans by treating problem loans as a jointly produced undesirable by-product of the loan production process. Our method uses the directional output distance function of Färe et al. [R. Färe, S. Grosskopf, D.-W. Noh, W.L. Weber, Characteristics of a polluting technology: Theory and practice, Journal of Econometrics 126 (20...