Asymmetric collateral requirements and output composition

Oscar Arce (), Jose Campa and Ángel Gavilán ()
Additional contact information
Ángel Gavilán: Banco de España

No 837, Working Papers from Banco de España

Abstract: This paper studies how investment and production in an economy is allocated across sectors when they face asymmetric financial conditions. Namely, when investors in one sector may run projects with higher loan-to-values than in another sector. Investors decide where to invest based on total rents and face a trade-off. While they may run larger projects in the sector with the best financial conditions, unit rents in this sector are lower than in the other sector due to a pledgeability premium. The level of interest rates affects this trade-off and therefore investors' endogenous segmentation across sectors. The effect is non-monotonic. When interest rates are high, projects are small and the differences in unit rents across sectors dominate the differences in project sizes. In this case, a drop in interest rates, move investors toward the most productive sector. Instead, when interest rates are low, projects are large, but much larger in the sector with the best financial conditions. In this case, the differences in project sizes across sectors dominate the differences in unit rents and a drop in interest rates moves investors towards the least productive sector but with the best access to external funding. We find that this hump-shaped relationship between interest rates and the share of investors allocated to a given sector may translate into a similar hump-shaped relationship between interest rates and the ratio of aggregate investment across sectors. Instead, in a model without financial asymmetries across sectors both relationships are monotonic and do not exhibit a hump. We claim that this paper provides helpful insights to understand the pattern of sectoral reallocation of investment and production observed in some OECD countries recently.

Keywords: Investment and credit; pledgeability premium; collateral constraints; sectoral allocation; housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 E32 E44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicaci ... o/08/Fic/dt0837e.pdf First version, February 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bde:wpaper:0837

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Banco de España Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ángel Rodríguez. Electronic Dissemination of Information Unit. Research Department. Banco de España ().