A Quantitative Theory of Information and Unsecured Credit

Kartik Athreya

No 68, 2008 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Over the past three decades four striking features of aggregates in the unsecured credit market have been documented: (1) rising availability of credit along both the intensive and extensive margins, (2) rising debt accumulation, (3) rising bankruptcy rates and discharge in bankruptcy, and (4) rising dispersion in interest rates across households. We provide a quantitative model of unsecured credit to interpret these facts; a novel contribution is that we allow for asymmetric information with individualized loan pricing. Our main finding is that all four outcomes mentioned above are consistent with the hypothesis that lenders observe more components of individual income now than in earlier periods. In addition, the paper makes a methodological contribution: an algorithm to locate equilibria with individualized pricing under asymmetric information, a task that is complicated by the requirement that off-equilibrium beliefs and prices are essential for equilibrium outcomes.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2008/paper_68.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Quantitative Theory of Information and Unsecured Credit (2012)
Working Paper: A quantitative theory of information and unsecured credit (2011)
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:red:sed008:68

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2008 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().