We study market inefficiencies and policy remedies when agents choose their occupations, and entrepreneurialtalent is subject to private information. Untalented entrepreneurs depress the returns to entrepreneurshipbecause of adverse selection. The severity of this problem depends on the outside...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government...

This paper explains both the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery afterwards in Russia and other Former Soviet Union (FSU) economies. Before the crisis banks do not lend to the real sector of the economy and firms use non-bank finance, including trade credits...

The share of off-balance sheet activity (OBSa) in the future of banking business has been questioned by the use of low-quality assets in this activity. Nevertheless, this paper puts forward the adverse selection hypothesis, which counter argues that more stable banks engage in OBSa to a larger...

This paper extends Ghatak (1999)'s base model of group lending with asymmetric information by allowing individuals to differ both in their exogenous risk type and in their endogenous effort level. We find that joint liability leads to positive assortative matching in both a non-cooperative and a...

This paper provides a unified theory to explain the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery in Russia and the former Soviet Union afterwards. Before the crisis, the banking sector in these economies was stuck in a development trap in which the banking sector is...

Credit limit management is of paramount importance for successful short-term credit-risk management, even more so when the situation in credit and financial markets is tense. We consider a continuous-time model where the credit provider and the credit taker interact within a game-theoretic...

We present a theoretical model of moral hazard and adverse selection in an imperfectly competitive loans market that is suitable for application to Africa. The model allows for variation in both the level of contract enforcement (depending on the quality of governance) and the degree of market...

We study how inefficiencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed heterogeneously with wealth and talent. In our model, market failure due to...