"Credit Rationing with Behavioral Foundations: Revisiting Stiglitz and " by Alessandra Cassar and Bruce Wydick
 

Document Type

Other

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

The seminal credit market model of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) proposes that asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders creates a moral hazard in which borrowers to have an incentive to invest in risky projects, creating the basis for a rationing equilibrium in credit markets. Other recent behavioral work, argues that a different type of behavior is more central to credit market risk: the temptation for borrowers to use borrowed capital to meet short-term consumption needs rather than for productive investment (Banerjee and Mullainathan, 2010). In this note, we present a simple model that is able to explain credit rationing where present-bias, rather than an incentive to undertake risky projects, characterizes the root source of risk under asymmetric information in credit markets.

Comments

Working Paper.

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