*the views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal reserve bank of Philadelphia or the Federal reserve system. you’ve probably heard of reverse mortgage loans. but even though these loans have been getting more attention in the media and in academia, it’s possible that you’re still not sure about what reverse mortgages really are.1 ost pe...

I compare welfare generated by a credit contract with individual liability and a contract with joint liability. The problem is credit rationing caused by limited liability and unobservable investment decisions. Joint liability induces borrowers to monitor each other, however the lender can also monitor. I show that wealthier borrowers may prefer riskier investments when liability is joint, whic...

Businesses that rely on a value-added network to provide information processing and communications services are only as secure as the network itself. The customer should understand the types of processing and control services provided by such vendors, and the potential exposures that use of these networks can entail. This article describes the control issues that must be addressed, the controls...

This paper examines the political influence on government bank lending decisions using the prefecture level panel data on Japan’s government loans from 1975 to 1992. I find that prefectures that were represented by more influential members of the ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), tended to receive more government loans. I also find that the amount of government loans tended to i...

We study insolvency cascades in an interbank system when banks are allowed to insure their loans with credit default swaps (CDS) sold by other banks. We show that, by properly shifting financial exposures from one institution to another, a CDS market can be designed to rewire the network of interbank exposures in a way that makes it more resilient to insolvency cascades. A regulator can use inf...

Guaranteed loan is a common way for an enterprise to raise money from banks without any collateral in China. It is welcome for both enterprises and banks when the economy is up. However, the situation becomes tough as long as the economy is down. The financial risk caused by guaranteed loans not only makes the enterprise which takes the loan in trouble but also spreads over the intertwined netw...

We examine whether stringent formal sector borrowing requirements in developing countries restrict credit access and the potential of asset-collateralized loans. When a Kenyan dairy cooperative exogenously replaced high down payments with loans collateralized by the asset itself a large water tank loan take-up increased from 2.4% to 41.9%. In contrast, substituting joint liability requirements ...

Background: There are several factors that lead to the growth or decline of the nonperforming loans, such as macroeconomic variables and bank specific variables, banks ownership structure, corruption and information sharing. Among them one of the main factors that affect the non-performing loans are the corruption. In developing countries corruption plays very important role in the growth of no...

Student Loans Repayment and Recovery: International Comparisons Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two issues in this paper, for 44 loans schem...