Publication: Dysfunctional Finance : Positive Shocks and Negative Outcomes
Abstract
n financial markets with asymmetric information about mean returns, borrowers with different default risks may pay the same rate of interest. If they do, the marginal borrower will have a high-risk, negative-value project. Under some conditions, technological change that increases each entrepreneur's output will attract a new set of negative-value projects. This adverse selection process will erode the ability rents of the inframarginal borrowers. I present an example in which it destroys the market. The results imply that a boom in a sector can lead to a crisis if institutional change to solve the screening problem does not occur.
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Publication Dysfunctional Finance : Positive Shocks and Negative Outcomes(2010-01-01)This paper shows how badly a market economy may respond to a positive productivity shock in an environment with asymmetric information about project quality: some, all, or even more than all the benefits from the increase in productivity may be dissipated. In the model, based on Bernanke and Gertler (1990), entrepreneurs with a low default probability are charged the same interest rate as entrepreneurs with a high default probability. The implicit subsidy from good types to bad means that the marginal entrant will have a negative-value project. An example is presented in which, after a positive productivity shock, the presence of enough bad type's forces the interest rate so high that it drives all entrepreneurs out of the market. This happens in an industry in which there are good projects that are productive. The problem is that they are contaminated in the capital market by bad projects because of the banks inability to distinguish good projects from bad. One possible explanation for the lack of development in some countries is that screening institutions are sufficiently weak that impersonal financial markets cannot function. If industrialization entails learning spillovers concentrated within national boundaries, and if initially informational asymmetries are sufficiently great that the capital market does not emerge, then neither industrialization nor the learning that it would foster will occur.Publication Demand Side Analysis of Microlending Markets in Germany(2009)In developing and transition economies, microlending has become an effective instrument for providing micro businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. In industrialized countries, with their highly developed banking systems, however, there has been ongoing debate on the question of whether an uncovered demand for microlending services exists. The present pilot study explores customer preferences for microlending products in Germany. Among the interviewed business owners, 15% reported revolving funding needs and an interest in microloans. We find that potential recipients of microloan products are retail business owners, foreign business owners, and persons who had previously received private loans. Furthermore, financial products should feature rapid access to short-term loans.Publication Formal Finance and Trade Credit during China's Transition(2009)Using a large panel dataset of Chinese industrial firms, we find that poorly performing SOEs were more likely to redistribute credit to firms with less privileged access to loans via trade credit. While that could be consistent with the efficient redistribution of credit, it is more likely that these SOEs extended trade credit to prop up faltering customers that were in arrears. By contrast, profitable private domestic firms were more likely to extend trade credit than unprofitable ones. Trade credit likely provided a substitute for loans for these firms' customers that were shut out of formal credit markets. As biases in lending become less severe, the allocation of lending became more efficient, and the amount of trade credit extended by private firms declined. Our evidence implies that redistribution of bank loans via trade was not a major contributor to China's explosive growth.Publication Formal Versus Informal Finance : Evidence from China(2010)The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is taken as evidence that informal finance can facilitate firm growth better than formal banks in developing countries. We examine firm financing patterns and growth using a database of twenty-four hundred Chinese firms. While a relatively small percentage of firms utilize bank loans, bank financing is associated with faster growth whereas informal financing is not. Controlling for selection, we find that firms with bank financing grow faster than similar firms without bank financing and that our results are not driven by bank corruption or the selection of firms that have accessed the formal financial system. Our findings question whether reputation and relationship-based financing are responsible for the performance of the fastest-growing firms in developing countries.Publication Subjective Perceptions of Financing Constraints: How Well Do They Reflect Credit Market Conditions?(2010)Many cross-country enterprise surveys have recently become widely available. They are the basis of rankings of dimensions of the business environment in emerging markets and developing economies. Although the literature is concerned about "perception bias", there has been little effort at analyzing whether subjective appraisals of credit market constraints correspond to objectively measurable indicators. This note assesses a predominantly used subjective measure of "access to finance" and relates it to indicators of financial development and credit availability and costs. It finds a significant relationship between subjective and objective indexes of financing constraint but the relationship varies substantially across indicators.
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