We argue that active management's popularity is not puzzling despite the industry's poor track record. Our explanation features decreasing returns to scale: As the industry's size increases, every manager's ability to outperform passive benchmarks declines. The poor track record occurred before...

The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social...

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...

In this paper we present a model of competition between informal lending and group lending. The paper is organized as follows. The second paragraph reviews the economic literature that analyzes separately group contracts and informal lending markets. The third paragraph tries to answer the...

The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social...

We propose a model that delivers endogenous variations in term spreads driven primarily by banks' portfolio decision and their appetite to bear the risk of maturity transformation. We first show that fluctuations of the future profitability of banks' portfolios affect their ability to cover for...

This paper introduces agent heterogeneity, liquidity, and endogenous default to a DSGE framework. Our model allows for a comprehensive assessment of regulatory and monetary policy, as well as welfare analysis in the different sectors of the economy. Due to liquidity and endogenous default, the...