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 study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks’ asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...

We study a dynamic model of monopolistic provision of commitment devices to sophisticated, Strotzian decision makers. We allow for unobservable heterogeneity at the contracting stage in the agents' preferences for commitment vs. flexibility. The first-best contracts under complete information...

Credit score cutoff rules result in very similar potential borrowers being treated differently by mortgage lenders. Recent research has used variation induced by these rules to investigate the connection between securitization and lender moral hazard in the recent financial crisis. However, the...

This paper models the strategic interaction between a rating agency, a banking sector and a bank regulator who lacks information about bank asset risk. The regulator can either (1) make bank capital requirements contingent on credit ratings; or (2) set rating independent capital requirements....

We study a change in the Swedish law that exogenously reduced the value of all outstanding company mortgages, i.e., a type of collateral that is comparable to the floating lien. We explore this natural experiment to identify how collateral determines borrower quality, loan terms, access to...

Banks provide risky loans to firms which have superior information regarding the quality of their projects. Due to asymmetric information the banks face the risk of adverse selection. Credit Value-at-Risk (CVaR) regulation counters the problem of low quality, i.e. high risk, loans and therefore...

We develop a novel theory of real estate foreclosure auctions, which have the special feature that the lender acts as a seller for low and as a buyer for high prices. The theory yields several empirically testable predictions concerning the strategic behavior of the agents, both under symmetric...

I address the following issue in this paper: how does information sharing among banks about borrowers affect banks' competition, and ultimately, the interest rate borrowers pay for the loan they take? One would expect that full information sharing among banks reduces lenders' risk and results in...

In this paper we show that the equilibrium in the Stiglitz-Weiss model (Stiglitz and Weiss, 1981) is a two-interest rate equilibrium. For this we use the true return-function for banks shown by Arnold (2005), the assumption of Bertrand competition and make a consideration for a discrete number...