This paper is a quantitative study of two frictions that generate banks' underinvestment in screening borrowers and, thus, overlending: 1) Limited liability, and 2) Banks failing to internalize that their credit decisions alter the pool of borrowers faced by other banks. The resulting lax...

We use the new market for Credit Risk Transfers (CRTs) and the landfall of two major hurricanes to study both how markets price default risk from natural disasters, and how U.S. mortgage rates would change in absence of government-backed guarantees. First, we exploit that CRTs differ in the...