We develop a model of financial intermediation characterized by an inside agency problem such that asset managers, when they have access to high enough liquidity, “reach for yield” by overinvesting in risky assets and concurrently underinvesting in safer or medium-risk assets. The managers follow a pecking order whereby their first preference is to invest in risky assets; their second preferenc...

Recently, a growing empirical literature in industrial organization studies the effect of adverse selection on market outcomes and welfare. In this paper, we ask the natural next question, how signaling affects equilibrium outcomes and welfare in markets with adverse selection. Using data from Prosper.com, an online credit market, we estimate a model of borrowers and lenders where low reserve i...

Information sharing about borrowers’ characteristics and their indebtedness can have important effects on credit markets activity. First, it improves the banks’ knowledge of applicants’ characteristics and permits a more accurate prediction of their repayment probabilities. Second, it reduces the informational rents that banks could otherwise extract from their customers. Third, it can operate ...

We study the Diamond-Dybvig [3] model as developed in Green and Lin [5] and Peck and Shell [7]. We dispense with the notion of a bank as a coalition of depositors. Instead, our bank is a self-interested agent with a technological advantage in recordkeeping. We examine the implications of the resulting agency problem for the design of bank contracts and the possibility of bank-run equilibria. Fo...

This paper examines how collateral and personal guarantees affect firms’ ex-post performance employing a propensity score matching estimation approach. Based on a unique firm-level panel data set of more than 500 small-and-medium-sized borrower firms in Japan, we find that borrowers that provide collateral to lenders experience larger increases in profitability and reductions in riskiness than ...

There is long-standing theoretical debate on the role of collateral in …nancial markets. There is no satisfactory evidence of the causal relationship (if any) between the amount of collateral required and the subsequent probability of overdues. We analyze an exogenous change in the number of cosigners required as collateral on small loans in South India. Our regression discontinuity approach re...