borrowers and supply less credit to unproductive firms when collateral values rise. My results provide direct evidence that …

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit … incidence of collateral. We exploit exogenous variation in lender information related to the adoption of an information … technology that reduces ex ante private information, and compare collateral outcomes before and after adoption. Our results are …

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical … literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems … ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with …

decouple across secured and unsecured markets following an adverse shock to credit risk. The scarcity of underlying collateral …

the U.S. We then establish the quantitative result that home equity does not serve as informal collateral for unsecured …