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Working Paper
Financing Repeat Borrowers: Designing Credible Incentives for Today and Tomorrow
We analyze relational contracts between a lender and borrower when borrower cash flows are not contractible and the costs of intermediation vary over time. Because lenders provide repayment incentives to borrowers through the continuation value of the lending relationship, borrowers will condition loan repayment on the likelihood of receiving loans in the future. Therefore, the borrower's beliefs about the lender's future liquidity and profitability become an important component of the borrower's repayment decision. Consequently, the possibility of high lending costs in the future weakens ...
Working Paper
Why are Manufacturing Plants Smaller in Developing Countries? Theory and Evidence from India
Poorer countries (and poorer states within India) have a larger share of manufacturing employment in small plants. This paper presents empirical evidence and a theoretical model to show that this relationship is driven by greater demand for lower quality goods in poorer regions, which can be produced efficiently in small plants. First, using data for India, we show that richer households buy higher price goods and larger plants produce higher price products. Second, we develop a model that matches these facts. Finally, we find that our model explains about forty percent of the cross-state ...
Working Paper
Corporate stress and bank nonperforming loans: Evidence from Pakistan
Using detailed administrative Pakistani credit registry data, we show that banks with low leverage ratios are both significantly slower and less likely to recognize a loan as nonperforming than other banks that lend to the same firm. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that this lack of recognition impedes loan curing, with banks with low leverage ratios reporting significantly higher final default rates than other banks for the same borrower (even after controlling for differences in loan terms). Our empirical findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction that classifying a ...
Discussion Paper
The Effect of Real Estate Prices on Chinese Bank Performance
This note examines how a major fall in real estate prices could affect banks' performances.
Working Paper
Efficient Public Good Provision in Networks : Revisiting the Lindahl Solution
The provision of public goods in developing countries is a central challenge. This paper studies a model where each agent?s effort provides heterogeneous benefits to the others, inducing a network of opportunities for favor-trading. We focus on a classical efficient benchmark ? the Lindahl solution ? that can be derived from a bargaining game. Does the optimistic assumption that agents use an efficient mechanism (rather than succumbing to the tragedy of the commons) imply incentives for efficient investment in the technology that is used to produce the public goods? To show that the answer is ...
Working Paper
Global Spillovers of a China Hard Landing
China?s economy has become larger and more interconnected with the rest of the world, thus raising the possibility that acute financial stress in China may lead to global financial instability. This paper analyzes the potential spillovers of such an event to the rest of the world with three methodologies: a VAR, an event study, and a DSGE model. We find the sentiment channel to be the primary spillover channel to the United States, affecting global risk aversion and asset prices such as equity prices and the dollar, in addition to modest real effects through the trade channel. In comparison, ...
Working Paper
Credit access and relational contracts: An experiment testing informational and contractual frictions for Pakistani farmers
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ifdp/credit-access-and-relational-contracts.htm
Working Paper
Finance and Inequality : The Distributional Impacts of Bank Credit Rationing
We analyze reductions in bank credit using a natural experiment where unprecedented flooding differentially affected banks that were more exposed to flooded regions in Pakistan. Using a unique dataset that covers the universe of consumer loans in Pakistan and this exogenous shock to bank funding, we find two key results. First, banks disproportionately reduce credit to new and less-educated borrowers, following an increase in their funding costs. Second, the credit reduction is not compensated by relatively more lending by less-affected banks. The empirical evidence suggests that adverse ...