This chapter provides new evidence on borrowers' hidden information about their riskiness and its link to their impatience. To do so, I analyze consumer loans on the German platform Smava, which has a unique peer-to-peer lending process. Observationally identical but unobservably riskier...

Although credit rationing has been a stylized fact since the groundbreaking papers by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981, hereinafter S-W) and Besanko and Thakor (1987a, hereinafter B-T), Arnold and Riley (2009) note that credit rationing is unlikely in the S-W model, and Clemenz (1993) shows that it does...

We show that lenders join a U.S. commercial credit bureau when information asymmetries between incumbents and entrants create an adverse selection problem that hinders market entry. Lenders also delay joining when information asymmetries protect them from competition in existing markets,...

I develop a framework of the buildup and outbreak of financial crises in an asymmetric information setting. In equilibrium, two distinct economic states arise endogenously: "normal times", periods of modest investment, and "booms", periods of expansionary investment. Normal times occur when the...