We consider borrowers with the opportunity to raise funds from a competitive baking sector, that shares information about borrowers, and an alternative hidden lender. We highlight that the presence of the hidden lender restricts the contracts that can be obtained from the banking sector and that...

We analyse credit market equilibrium when banks screen loan applicants. When banks have a convex cost function of screening, a pure strategy equilibrium exists where banks optimally set interest rates at the same level as their competitors. This result complements Broecker’s (1990) analysis,...

Why do some start-up firms raise funds from banks and others from venture capitalists? To answer this question, I develop a model of start-up financing when intellectual property rights are not well protected. The upside of VC financing is that the VC understands the business better than a bank....

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to study whether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetary policy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely, as the ratio of bank debt...

We model a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) that is too big (or too interconnected) to fail. Without credible regulation and strong supervision, the shareholders of this institution might deliberately let its managers take excessive risk. We propose a solution to this problem,...

This paper proposes a model of financial markets and corporate finance, with asymmetric information and no taxes, where equity issues, Bank debt and Bond financing may all co-exist in equilibrium. The paper emphasizes the relationship Banking aspect of financial intermediation: firms turn to...

We study the credit supply effects of the unexpected freeze of the European interbank market, using exhaustive Portuguese loan-level data. We find that banks that rely more on interbank borrowing before the crisis decrease their credit supply more during the crisis. The credit supply reduction...

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard models of strategic thinking, in this framework the player's "depth of reasoning" is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach,...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe eventual outcomes. In these instances, individuals often prefer to remain ignorant. These contexts are outside the scope of analysis of the standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) expected utility model,...

We analyze a mutual fire insurance mechanism used in Andorra, which is called La Crema in the local language. This mechanism relies on households' announced property values to determine how much a household is reimbursed in the case of a fire and how payments are apportioned among other...