This paper proposes and tests a theory of credit-driven asset bubbles which are neutral in their real effects. When a lender such as a government, central bank, or banking sector is willing to lend infinitely against collateral, explosive asset bubbles can form which exactly offset a bubble in...

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a fresh start after bankruptcy reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditors who recover less of their credit after a debtor's bankruptcy, lenders may charge higher interest rates or...

In the education literature, it is generally acknowledged that both credit and insurance for students are rationed. In order to provide a rationale for these observations, we present a model with perfectly competitive banks and risk averse students who have private information on their ability...

This paper employs a stylized New Keynesian DSGE model for a monetary union to analyze whether cyclical inflation differentials can be explained by cross-country differences concerning the characteristics of financial markets. Our results suggest that empirically plausible degrees of...

In modern macroeconomic models it is difficult to obtain explosive price bubbles on assets with positive net supply. This paper shows that it is possible to obtain explosive bubbles in certain situations when assets such as land are used as collateral and lenders are willing to lend freely...

This paper presents a new approach to deriving default intensities from CDS or bond spreads that yields smooth intensity curves required e.g. for pricing or risk management purposes. Assuming continuous premium or coupon payments, the default intensity can be obtained by solving an integral...

The meltdown in residential real-estate prices that commenced in 2006 resulted in unprecedented mortgage delinquency rates. Until mid-2009, lenders and servicers pursued their own individual loss mitigation practices without being significantly influenced by government intervention. Using a...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

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 between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

We analyse the European interbank market in a general equilibrium model. Several institutional aspects of the market are taken into consideration, especially the Eurosystem‘s two standing facilities, reserve requirements of banks and the fact that borrowing from the Eurosystem has to be...