In 2004, Brazil provided an interesting natural experiment concerning personal credit. A new law was enacted allowing …, the new law has caused a reduction in interest rates and an increase in the volume of personal credit. …

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European …. Enforceability within each village's centralized afternoon market ensures collateralization of credit in decentralized markets. In … the resulting equilibrium, money and credit coexist in decentralized markets if the use of credit is costly. Our analysis …

We show that illiquid assets such as bank loans are used by euro area banks both as central bank collateral for short … effects and (3) there are significant switching costs between the various uses of bank loans as collateral so historical … decisions also determine the use of bank loans as collateral. …

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit … incidence of collateral. We exploit exogenous variation in lender information related to the adoption of an information … technology that reduces ex ante private information, and compare collateral outcomes before and after adoption. Our results are …

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical … literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems … paper attempts to do so using a credit registry that is unique in that it allows the researcher to have access to some …