access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and aggregate shocks, we show that the cyclical behavior of … credit match the sizes of credit and bankruptcy volatilities. We also find that when the right to file for bankruptcy does …

We analyze the role of debt in persuading an entrepreneur to pay out cash flows, rather than to divert them. In the … first part of the paper we study the optimal debt contract -- specifically, the trade-off between the size of the loan and … the repayment -- under the assumption that some debt contract is optimal. In the second part we consider a more general …