Empirical evidence suggests that capital-market constraints prevent low-wealth individuals from setting up in business. This paper shows this finding to be consistent with socially excessive lending and an interest-rate tax being welfare-improving. One feature of the model, banks' inability to...

This paper investigates the implications of adverse selection for capital market equilibrium when borrowers are risk averse. K. J. Arrow and R. C. Lind (1970) argue that when capital markets fail to spread risk properly interest rates are too high. The market adds a risk premium that the social...

Equilibrium credit rationing, in the sense of Stiglitz and Weiss, is shown to imply that the marginal cost of funds to the borrower is infinite. So entrepreneurs have an overwhelming incentive to cut their loans by a dollar and so avoid rationing. Ways of doing this include scaling down the...

Compensation schemes often reward success but do not penalize failure. Fixed salaries with stock options or bonuses have this feature. Yet the standard principal-agent model implies that pay is normally monotonically increasing in performance. This paper shows that, under loss aversion, there...

Equilibrium credit rationing, in the sense of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981), implies the borrower faces an infinite marginal cost of funds. Infinitessimily delaying the project to accumulate more wealth is therefore advantageous to the borrower. As a result, the well-known conditions for credit...

Executive stock options reward success but do not penalise failure. In contrast, the standard principalagent model implies that pay is normally monotonically increasing in performance. This paper shows that, under loss aversion, the use of carrots but not sticks is a feature of an optimal...

Equilibrium credit rationing in the sense of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) implies the marginal cost of funds to the borrower is infinite. So borrowers have an overwhelming incentive to cut their loan by a dollar and thereby avoiding being rationed. Ways of doing this include scaling down the...

Compensation schemes often reward success but do not penalize failure. Fixed salaries with stock options or bonuses have this feature. Yet the standard principal–agent model implies that pay is normally monotonically increasing in performance. This paper shows that, under loss aversion, there...