(Provides original sociological research on the development of consumer credit scoring in the United States and its links to subprime mortgage finance.)

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which financial shocks have large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning their uncertain environment. When agents update their beliefs about the parameters that govern the unobserved process driving financial shocks...

This paper argues that mainstream economic the- ory, far from providing an indisputable plea in favor of shareholder value-maximization, o ers striking arguments showing quite the opposite: pro t maximization cannot be a legitimate prioritar- ian goal for private rms. This opens the door for a...

We study the consequences of dropping the perfect competition assumption in a standard infinite horizon model with infinitely-lived traders and real collateralized assets, together with one additional ingredient : information among players is asymmetric and monitoring is incomplete. The key...