We show how ownership of the firm by its customers, as well as nonprofit status, can prevent firms from using contractual terms that take advantage of consumer biases. By eliminating an outside residual claimant with control over the firm, these alternatives to investor ownership reduce the...

Advances in information-processing technology have eroded the advantages of small scale and proximity to customers that traditionally enabled small lenders to thrive. Nonetheless, the membership and market share of US credit unions have increased, though their average size has also risen. We...

In a relatively recent paper, Gehrig and Stenbacka (Eur Econ Rev 51, 77-99, 2007) show that information sharing increases banks’ profits to the detriment of creditworthy entrepreneurs in a model of a banking duopoly with switching costs and poaching. They restrict their analysis to the case in...

In a relatively recent paper, Gehrig and Stenbacka (Eur Econ Rev 51, 77–99, 2007) show that information sharing increases banks’ profits to the detriment of creditworthy entrepreneurs in a model of a banking duopoly with switching costs and poaching. They restrict their analysis to the case...

The impact of technology-enabled (FinTech) lenders on bank credit is theoretically ambiguous. Banks can reduce credit if borrowing from FinTech lenders increases default risk. Alternatively, banks can provide more credit if such borrowing signals creditworthiness. I examine these possibilities...

This paper proposes a positive theory of the links between banks' capitalisation and their liquidity risk taking, the extent of fire-sale problems, and the severity of liquidity crises. In a basic framework with a single bank, we find that banks' incentives to hold liquidity for precautionary...

Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...

It is not surprising that the financing of early-stage creative projects and ventures is typically geographically localized since these types of funding decisions are usually predicated on personal relationships and due diligence requiring face-to-face interactions in response to high levels of...

Questo lavoro mira ad analizzare l’accesso al credito delle imprese innovative testando l’impatto della natura innovativa delle imprese: (a) sul costo del credito bancario; (b) sulla probabilità di restrizione del credito. L’analisi empirica utilizza le informazioni ottenute...

Credit crunches, such as in the recent financial crisis, generally occur when banks are themselves funding constrained. We use this observation to repair the workhorse Stiglitz–Weiss model of credit rationing. Recent research has invalidated the distributional assumption on which that model is...