In many countries, lenders are restricted in their access to information about borrowers' past defaults. The authors study this provision in a model of repeated borrowing and lending with moral hazard and adverse selection. They analyze its effects on borrowers' incentives and access to credit,...

Entry barriers into social insurance programs will be effective screening devices if they cause only those individuals receiving higher benefits from a program to participate in that program. We find evidence for this by using plausibly exogenous variations in travel-related entry costs into the...

In many countries, lenders are not permitted to use information about past defaults after a specified period of time has elapsed. We model this provision and determine conditions under which it is optimal. We develop a model in which entrepreneurs must repeatedly seek external funds to finance a...

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic...

In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal...

In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is...

The Great Recession offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk models under conditions of economic stress. We focus on the performance of models of credit risk applied to risk-segmented credit card portfolios. Specifically, we focus on models of default and loss and...

In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private...

The Great Recession offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk models under conditions of economic stress. We focus on the performance of models of credit risk applied to risk-segmented credit card portfolios. Specifically, we focus on models of default and loss and...