Credit Search and Credit Cycles

Feng Dong, Pengfei Wang and Yi Wen

No 2015-23, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Abstract: The supply and demand of credit are not always well aligned and matched, as is reflected in the countercyclical excess reserve-to-deposit ratio and interest spread between the lending rate and the deposit rate. We develop a search-based theory of credit allocations to explain the cyclical fluctuations in both bank reserves and the interest spread. We show that search frictions in the credit market can not only naturally explain the countercyclical bank reserves and interest spread, but also generate endogenous business cycles driven primarily by the cyclical utilization rate of credit resources, as long conjectured by the Austrian school of the business cycle. In particular, we show that credit search can lead to endogenous local increasing returns to scale and variable capital utilization in a model with constant returns to scale production technology and matching functions, thus providing a micro-foundation for the indeterminacy literature of Benhabib and Farmer (1994) and Wen (1998).

Keywords: Search Frictions; Credit Utilization; Credit Rationing; Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Business Cycles. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E1 E2 E3 E4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2015-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-dge and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Journal Article: Credit search and credit cycles (2016)
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