Short-term, collateralized, debt is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the value of the collateral. When the economy relies on this informationally-insensitive debt, information is not renewed over time. If the value of collateral is mean...

This paper builds models of nonlinear dynamics in the aggregate investment and borrower net worth to study the causes and nature of endogenous credit cycles. The basic model has two types of projects: the Good and the Bad. The Good projects rely on the inputs supplied by others who could...