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 … ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with …

perapplicant fixed costs in screening. We then demonstrate that our theory fits the data better than the main alternative theory … already in the literature, which supposes cutoff rules are exogenously used by securitizers. Furthermore, we use our theory to …

research has hypothesized that these cutoff rules result from a securitization rule of thumb. Under this theory, an observed … model that rationalizes such an origination rule of thumb. Under this alternative theory, jumps in default are not evidence … securitization rule-of-thumb theory but consistent with the origination rule-of-thumb theory. There are jumps in the number of loans …

type of collateral that is comparable to the floating lien. We explore this natural experiment to identify how collateral …-in-differences approach, we find that following the change in the law and the loss in collateral value borrowers pay a higher interest rate on … credit by their bank. The reduction in collateral value also precedes a decrease in bank monitoring intensity and frequency …

decouple across secured and unsecured markets following an adverse shock to credit risk. The scarcity of underlying collateral …

some collateral requirement for financial assets; second, information among players about the structure of uncertainty is …