asymmetric information signaling and environmental taxes in oligopoly abstract this paper examines the effects of signaling on environmental taxation in a two period oligopoly model in which each firm privately knows whether its technology is clean or dirty while third parties the rival firms and the regulator have only a subjective perception about this fact consequently there are both horizontal and vertical asymmetric information and each firm can strategically manipulate both the competitor s and the regulator s priors in this context we find that each firm wishes to be perceived as a technologically clean firm in period 2 whenever the regulator s ecological conscience is sufficiently high we also show that taxes under symmetric information are always positive but under asymmetric information and signaling they may be negative subsidies and lower or greater than in the symmetric information case depending on the ecological conscience of the regulator and the probability of firms being dirty finally taxes are below environmental marginal damage both under symmetric and asymmetric information and signaling reinforces such under taxation

depletable externalities and pigouvian taxation abstract in their book baumol and oates the theory of environmental policy externalities public outlays and the quality of life prentice hall englewood cliffs n j 1975 argue that whether an externality is depletable private or undepletable public is the key characteristic in determining the optimal pricing pattern they argue that unlike the undepletable case a negative depletable externality requires not only a charge or tax on the generator of the externality but a payment or compensation to the victim in order to achieve pareto optimality it is shown that the key characteristic determining whether compensation of victims is required for efficiency is not the depletability of the externality but whether the victim can costlessly control or limit the amount of the damaging substance received

market response to bank relationships evidence from korean bank reform abstract this paper examines how the forced closure of failing banks and the transfer of their loans to surviving banks affect the market value of firms that borrow from the closed banks pre existing relationships between firms and the banks that acquire their loans are detrimental to the positive valuation effects of the event banks may have an incentive to favor pre existing relationships to increase the value of previously extended loans therefore loan renewals to firms with prior relationships do not signal borrower quality to the market which is aware of the banks conflicts of interest this study highlights the importance of the specific mechanisms employed to replace failed banks without decreasing the value of their client firms

the effects of monetary policy shocks comparing contemporaneous versus long run identifying restrictions this study compares the effects of monetary policy shocks on the macroeconomy using four different procedures for identifying policy shocks that use contemporaneous restrictions and a procedure that uses long run restrictions impulse response functions are computed using the same vector autoregressive var model and sample period the comparison is done for a model that includes only a short term interest rate and for a model that adds a long term rate as well sources of differences in the magnitude of effects across identification schemes are examined vector autoregressive var models have been widely used in recent years to analyze the effects of monetary policy shocks however estimates of the macroeconomic effects of monetary policy often differ across studies with regard to both timing and magnitude the studies generating these estimates frequently differ in terms of the variables constituting the model the sample period for estimation and the method of identifying policy shocks see e g christiano eichenbaum and evans 1994 1996 1998 gordon and leeper 1994 lastrapes and selgin 1995 pagan and robertson 1995 1998 leeper sims and zha 1996 certainly a critical element in the estimation of the effects of policy shocks is the identification of these policy shocks that is the determination of exogenous shocks to monetary policy two methods have been widely used in the var literature to identify structural shocks to monetary policy one general approach employs restrictions on the contemporaneous relations among the variables of the var model while the second general approach imposes restrictions on the long run relations among the variables although economic and institutional arguments can be used to rationalize each identification scheme there is no consensus as to which approach to identifying shocks is preferred and the weaknesses of both approaches have been discussed in the literature keating 1992 lastrapes and selgin 1995 and mccarthy 1995 consider limitations of the use of contemporaneous identifying restrictions faust and leeper 1997 discuss potential drawbacks of imposing long run restrictions the aim of this study is to examine the implications of contemporaneous versus long run

deposit insurance and the discount window pricing under asymmetric information the risk sensitive pricing of deposit insurance and the discount window is determined in an environment where banks have private information concerning their financial conditions the two facilities are managed jointly an incentive compatible policy is designed such that banks choice of terms at which they can obtain insurance and access to discount window credit will reveal their asset quality the function of the discount window is to be a risk neutral lender of last resort to banks in a market dominated by risk averse depositors the need to regulate banks is commonly linked to the risk independent pricing of deposit insurance in that it provides banks with an incentive to increase their risk taking activities 1 critics of the present system have long advocated risk sensitive deposit insurance premiums and a literature is emerging that examines the variety of such pricing schemes 2 this literature typically assumes that the public insuring agency has the same information as the bank concerning the quality of the bank s assets this is both implausible and potentially misleading the bank normally has superior information concerning its assets a pricing policy that ignores this informational asymmetry is likely to provide banks with similar risk taking incentives that is associated with the current riskinsensitive pricing arrangement kane 6 p 275 for example appreciates this aspect of the problem i t is necessary not only to reprice but also to redesign the existing system the fdic and fslic must develop incentive compatible my emphasis insurance contracts and price them fairly contractual incentives must be established that would allow a low risk institution to lower its premiums by communicating to the insurance agency what its own managers know about the institution s own exposure therefore as kane argues a redesigned insurance system is needed that would provide incentives to the banks to truthfully reveal the necessary information and thereby facilitate the efficient pricing of the risk shifted to the public insurer a variety of pricing policies that involve a bank s choice of capital or asset liability composition

pollution taxation and strategic behaviour abstract this paper proposes a pollution tax to be imposed on the victim and the injurer to discourage strategic moves by the victim to exploit the injurer an uniformed regulator induces an optimal emission of pollution by choosing an appropriate stochastic tax

financial innovation new assets and the behavior of money demand abstract two fundamental changes in us banking regulations have affected the behavior of money demand m1 the first authorized checkable deposit accounts paying explicit interest rates the second allowed these rates to be market determined the theoretical literature does not directly address the impact of these events suggesting that they are primarily an empirical issue however the empirical literature has yet to agree on the impact of financial innovation on money demand for example several studies report an increase in the elasticity of money demand several others report a decline this paper uses a lancaster type choice model to analyze formally the expected impact of these two changes on the demand for money the model derives specific conditions under which i the demand for money increases as new assets are introduced and ii the impact of either the introduction of new assets or the elimination of interest rate restrictions on the elasticity of money demand

fixed versus variable rate loans this paper discusses the nature of fixed and variable loan contracts and derives the conditions which determine the optimal quantity of each the results indicate that the payoff functions are quite different and dependent upon the project financed the appropriate conditions for the allocation of loan terms to a set of borrowers are then developed finally the analysis derives the optimal portfolio frontier and risk return trade off for the banking firm here it is demonstrated that the solution is unlikely to be at a point of zero interest rate risk

imperfect competition in bank retail markets deposit and loan rate dynamics and incomplete pass through this paper examines determinants of pass through from the market interest rate to bank retail deposit and loan rates a dynamic adjustment cost model with imperfect competition implies that these rates depend on own lagged values and on lagged current and expected future values of the security rate greater competition in retail markets reduces the impact of lagged and expected rates on current retail rates while raising the effect of the current security rate yielding greater pass through these results have important implications for both the specifications used in empirical work and biases introduced into estimates of pass through effects

monetary policy trade offs and the correlation between nominal interest rates and real output the authors present a structural model of the u s economy that combines their price contracting specification with a term structure relationship an aggregate demand curve and a monetary policy reaction function the model matches important features of postwar data well and provides a structural explanation of the correlation between real output and the short term nominal rate of interest the authors perform a battery of monetary policy experiments that show that as viewed through the lens of this model monetary policy has struck a good balance recently among competing monetary policy objectives copyright 1995 by american economic association

discount window borrowing after 2003 the explicit reduction in implicit costs abstract in 2003 the federal reserve introduced primary credit as its main discount window lending program this program replaced the adjustment credit program which subject to a number of restrictions had generated a stigma associated with borrowing from the federal reserve lessening the stigma of borrowing was viewed as essential for reducing the reluctance to borrow from the federal reserve we develop a structural model of daily borrowing using this model we estimate the implicit cost associated with borrowing our results suggest that the stigma of borrowing is significantly reduced

the short run volatility of money stock targeting abstract the altered allocations of money market volatility obtained by alternative monetary policy procedures are illustrated by stochastic simulations of a staff monthly model the results indicate the nature of the tradeoff between short run volatility in the money stock and in the funds rate that is available to money stock targeting procedures

optimal debt structure and the number of creditors within an optimal contracting framework we analyze the optimal number of creditors a company borrows from we also analyze the optimal allocation of security interests among creditors and intercreditor voting rules that govern renegotiation of debt contracts the key to our analysis is the idea that these aspects of the debt structure affect the outcome of debt renegotiation following a default debt structures that lead to inefficient renegotiation are beneficial in that they deter default but they are also costly if default is beyond a manager s control the optimal debt structure balances these effects we characterize how the optimal debt structure depends on firm characteristics such as its technology its credit rating and the market for its assets

multiple versus single banking relationships theory and evidence a theory of the optimal number of banking relationships is developed and tested using matched bank firm data according to the theory relationship banks may be unable to continue funding profitable projects owing to internal problems and a firm may thus have to refinance from nonrelationship banks the latter however face an adverse selection problem as they do not know the quality of the project and may refuse to lend in these circumstances multiple banking can reduce the probability of an early liquidation of the project the empirical evidence supports the predictions of the model

are good or bad borrowers discouraged from applying for loans evidence from us small business credit markets this paper takes the concept of a discouraged borrower originally formulated by kon and storey kon y storey d j 2003 a theory of discouraged borrowers small business economics 21 37 49 and examines whether discouragement is an efficient self rationing mechanism using us data it finds riskier borrowers have higher probabilities of discouragement which increase with longer financial relationships suggesting discouragement is an efficient self rationing mechanism it also finds low risk borrowers are less likely to be discouraged in concentrated markets than in competitive markets and that in concentrated markets high risk borrowers are more likely to be discouraged the longer their financial relationships we conclude discouragement is more efficient in concentrated than in competitive markets

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

access to finance for innovative smes since the financial crisis in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis there has been increased focus on access to finance for small firms research from before the crisis suggested that it was harder for innovative firms to access finance yet no research has considered the differential effect of the crisis on innovative firms this paper addresses this gap using a dataset of over 10 000 uk sme employers we find that innovative firms are more likely to be turned down for finance than other firms and this worsened significantly in the crisis however regressions controlling for a host of firm characteristics show that the worsening in general credit conditions has been more pronounced for non innovative firms with the exception of absolute credit rationing which still remains more severe for innovative firms the results suggest that there are two issues in the financial system the first is a structural problem which restricts access to finance for innovative firms the second is a cyclical problem has been caused by the financial crisis and has impacted relatively more severely on non innovative firms

estimating the discount rate policy reaction function of the monetary authority this paper estimates a policy rule that explains the sign and the magnitude of the federal reserve s fed s discount rate changes it sets out a two sided type ii tobit model and develops a procedure for its estimation considering the discrete and censored nature of the changes the results suggest that the fed has conducted discount rate policy counter cyclically to influence output and to curb inflation and that the fed s response to policy indicators varies over monetary regimes furthermore consistency is found between the model prediction of the discount rate change and a classification based on whether the change is technical or non technical copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

perceived credit constraints in the european union the promotion and support of small and medium sized enterprises smes is an essential component of policies designed to help improve europe s economic performance a crucial issue is whether smes face difficulty obtaining bank loans using pre crisis survey data from 2005 and 2006 for nearly 3 500 smes firms with fewer than 250 employees in the european union eu we investigate the determinants of perceived bank loan accessibility at the firm level and at the country level based on hierarchical multi level binomial logit regressions our findings show that the youngest and smallest smes have the worst perception of access to bank loans the smes in nations with concentrated banking sectors are more positive about loan accessibility in addition a high fraction of foreign owned banks is associated with improved perception of loan accessibility in the eu 15 but not in the eu 10

a note on discount rate policy and the variability of discount window borrowing abstract the purpose of this note is to evaluate the appropriate discount rate policy rules consistent with minimization of the variability of borrowing at the federal reserve discount window in the context of goodfriend s 1983 model of the bank borrowing decision it is demonstrated that either a penalty rate or a subsidy rate policy will produce minimized variability of borrowing so long as the subsidy rate adjusts point for point to changes in the value of the federal funds rate these policy rules are compatible with a policy procedure designed to target borrowed or non borrowed reserves if the fed does not adhere to one of these specific rules minimization of borrowing variability requires an open market procedure in which the fed pegs the federal funds rate

an empirical investigation of the determinants of discount window borrowing a disaggregate analysis abstract this article investigates the individual demand for discount window credit by employing a cross sectional time series database of commercial banks the analysis employs a simple linear model that accounts for the latent nature of individual borrowing our findings reveal that borrowing is positively correlated with the federal funds discount rate spread large borrowers are shown to have a stronger correlation between borrowing and the federal funds spread in addition we find that the nonpriee mechanism is more binding on large banks that avoid contiguous use of the discount facility or defer their visit in the expectation that interest rates will increase in the near future

the federal funds market under bank deregulation the introduction of competitive interest rates on deposits is shown to effect the optimal decisions of banks by altering their optimal forecast of the federal funds rate the movement toward co mpetitive deposit rates increases the size of the monetary base neces sary for the fed to maintain its deposit targets when deposits and the monetary base are substitutes in addition there is less uncertainty in the federal funds market under competitive deposit rates when deposits and the monetary base are substitutes and the source of uncertainty is not from the supply of deposits copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

what measures chinese monetary policy abstract this paper models the pbc s operating procedures in a two stage vector autoregression framework we decompose changes in policy variables into exogenous and endogenous components in order to find a clean monetary policy indicator whose changes are mainly policy induced our main findings are twofold first the pbc s operating procedures have evolved over time since about 2006 they have developed to a relatively stable regime second its operating procedures are neither pure interest rate targeting nor pure reserves targeting but a mixture a set of indicators all contain information about the policy stance finally we construct a new composite indicator of the overall policy stance

price effects inefficient environmental policy and windfall profits we examine conditions under which a new or tighter restriction on emissions from a competitive polluting industry creates price effects in adjacent markets price effects may arise when a quantity restriction on emissions causes output to fall and therefore output price to rise they may also arise when the required reduction in output causes the price of a polluting input to fall we model emissions as a fixed proportion of output limiting the possibilities for input substitutions the possibility of price effects exists whenever the set of regulated firms is large relative to its input or output markets a possibility that is expressly ruled out in montgomery s j econ theory 5 395 418 1972 paper two potential implications of price effects are explored one is an efficiency concern a welfare maximizing regulator who neglects price effects will require more than the optimal level of abatement the other is a distributional concern an emissions restriction might create windfall profits for the polluting industry

administering the window abstract this paper presents a game theoretic model of nonprice rationing at the discount window it focuses on the federal reserve s use of frequency guidelines and harassment to deter excessive use of the discount window by banks the model investigates the role of the discount officer the effect of uncertainty and the credibility of threats used by the discount officer to deter excessive borrowing by banks

designing development planning charges settlement patterns cost recovery and public facilities there is a large body of literature that discusses the control of settlement patterns using traditional planning instruments whilst there is some theoretical literature discussing the use of development charges to influence settlement patterns by addressing market failure there is limited literature examining how such charging is implemented in practice this paper presents the theoretical basis for development charging based on the pigouvian tradition and discusses how these charges can be calibrated it identifies the potential for second best approaches including hypothecation of revenues this approach is distinguished from infrastructure charging which is a cost recovery instrument the irish system of infrastructure charging is assessed as a means of exploring how current instrument design could be improved to align with policy aspirations using the lessons that theory provides

near integration bank reluctance and discount window borrowing abstract this study puts forth stationarity considerations in explaining the observed breakdown between aggregate discount window borrowing and the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate during the post 1987 period tests with biweekly data indicate stationarity for adjustment borrowing but cannot reject the unit root for the spread the goodfriend dutkowsky dynamic implicit cost formulation can accommodate the contrasting stationarity properties structural restrictions are compatible with stationary borrowing and a stationary or near integrated spread while empirical findings from the static model indicate greater bank reluctance to borrow over time the dynamic model gives considerably less support

a model of the commercial loan rate this paper explores the theoretical and empirical determinants of the commercial loan rate charged by commercial banks based on a model of financial intermediary behavior which assumes monopolistic competition in asset and liability markets the model incorporates the constraint that banks must maintain at least a minimum quantity of bonds in asset portfolios equations are estimated on a time series basis to explain the behavior of commercial loan rates over the period 1953 to 1980 the evidence appears consistent with the hypothesis that commercial banks operate in a market characterized by imperfect competition and that they explicitly set loan rates the development of large scale econometric models has focused attention on the operation of the commercial loan market because of the importance of commercial loan activity in the transmission of monetary policy moreover it is commonly accepted that the quantity of commercial loans or changes in these loans has an important influence on the holding of free reserves by commercial banks and this implies that the commercial loan market has an effect on the supply of money 2 nevertheless the determinants of commercial loan rates have drawn relatively little analytical attention previous work on the commercial loan market has generally focused on the question of whether this market is characterized by credit rationing 3 most studies assume that the commercial loan market is generally competitive but at times the commercial loan rate does not clear the market the quantity of loans transacted is constrained by the supply function and commercial banks engage in nonprice rationing of customers a corollary of this rationing hypothesis is that events in the deposit market have an important influence on the quantity of commercial loans 4 the purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of the commercial

reserves announcements and interest rates does monetary policy matter the author provides evidence on the perceived existence of strong liquidity effect the analysis is based on the response of the term structure of interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of bank reserves during the post october 1979 period it is shown that unanticipated changes in the mix between borrowed and nonborrowed reserves cause expected real interest rates to change after the announcement because they provide information about a future change in the supply of money a precise model is developed and tested during subperiods of nonborrowed and borrowed reserves targeting by the fed

the policy evaluation problem and the demand for money abstract this paper applies the lucas policy evaluation proposition to the money demand function we find some support for the hypothesis that the decrease in serial correlation of interest rates since the fed policy change in 1979 has resulted in an increase in the estimated elasticity of money demand

pigou and coase a mathematical reconciliation abstract this paper provides a rigorous statement of the coase theorem and establishes a formal equivalence between abstract allocative mechanisms attributed to coase and pigou the model proceeds from output functions that reduce to production functions in special cases thereby capturing effects that are obscured by conventional production and cost functions the model also emphasizes fundamental differences in the characteristics of inputs particularly land that are implied in the construction of externality stories finally the model embodies a clear distinction between local e g nuisance and global e g pollution externalities the coase theorem as stated is valid only in the former case

the polluter pays versus the pollutee pays principle under asymmetric information abstract this paper compares the pollutee pays principle with the polluter pays principle in a model of one sided externalities and asymmetric information even allowing for mitigation through contracts pollution reductions traded for subsidies or compensations will not result in the perfect information social optimum but will bias the outcome favoring the one with the property right while the pollutee pays principle allows for global incentive mechanisms such voluntary arrangements are severely restricted for the polluter pays principle indeed these conditions for an out of court settlements low damage and large benefits from pollution somehow contradict the polluter pays principle

uk bank services for small business how competitive is the market abstract this study is the first to employ an econometric model to examine the pricing behaviour of british financial institutions with respect to key bank products services offered to small and medium sized enterprises smes including current accounts investment accounts business loans and mortgages a mean group approach is used on a panel of monthly data to gauge individual banks reactions to identify factors influencing the setting of deposit and loan rates and to assess the competitive structure that best describes the uks sme banking market though the results should be interpreted with caution the empirical evidence is suggestive of a complex oligopoly policies directed at improving information and making it easier for small businesses to change banks accounts would reduce inertia and improve competition among financial institutions

the latent demand for bank debt characterizing discouraged borrowers concerns that small firms encounter credit constraints are well entrenched in the literature despite widespread empirical evidence that a relatively small proportion of small firms have their loan applications rejected however many firms may be discouraged from applying for fear of rejection these businesses are the focus of this paper based on responses to a large scale postal survey of uk small and medium sized enterprises smes we find that twice as many businesses were discouraged from applying for a bank loan than had their loan request denied more particularly we observe a number of distinguishing characteristics of discouraged borrowers relative to applicants these include strategy sector prior entrepreneurial experience and banking relationships the implications of our findings for policy and future research are briefly discussed

monetary policy secrecy and federal funds rate behavior abstract the behavior of the federal reserve system can be characterized as secretive one common justification for this secrecy is the financial markets will overreact to information causing undue variability in interest rates this paper examines the credibility of this assertion under the post october 1979 non borrowed reserves operating procedure the major result is that conditional on this operating procedure secrecy can reduce the variability of the federal funds rate however in a result analogous to barro 1976 secrecy raises the variance of the forecasting error of the federal funds rate

didmca and bank market risk theory and evidence abstract this paper examines the theoretical and empirical consequences of the depository institutions deregulation and monetary control act of 1980 on the market risk of the us banking industry we survey several theoretical arguments linking deregulation of deposit interest rates to market based measures of bank risk capital market data for a sample of large commercial bank holding companies provides evidence that deregulation has accompanied increases in both systematic and nonsystematic measures of bank risk

monetary policy rules and the indicator properties of asset prices abstract we investigate relationships between asset prices and inflation in a modern keynesian model in which monetary policy controls inflation by manipulating the federal funds rate the indicator properties of asset prices are quite sensitive to the monetary policy rule including the asset prices themselves in the reaction function can invert the sense of the indicator properties targeting the asset prices is tantamount to targeting the real interest rate when all of the weight in the reaction function is placed on asset prices the real rate converges so rapidly that policy loses control of inflation

self protection strategic interactions and the relative endogeneity of disease risks self protection is a key behavior that influences infectious disease risks spillovers in disease protection create different types of strategic interactions under certain conditions multiple nash equilibria may arise with the possibility of coordination failure involving excessively low self protection in which case individuals expectations of others efforts determine which outcome arises in prior studies assumed technical relations between self protection and infection probabilities drove the strategic interactions we demonstrate that strategic relations can be endogenously determined and depend on the relative endogeneity of risk rer defined here as the degree to which individuals can take control of their own risks in a strategic setting the potential for coordination failure may arise when rer is sufficiently small whereas larger levels of rer may eliminate this possibility to ensure larger levels of self protection we find that imposing a behaviorally dependent indemnity may increase rer to eliminate the possibility of coordination failure we apply our analysis to the problem of livestock disease and illustrate the theory using a numerical example of the 2001 united kingdom foot and mouth disease epidemic

international evidence on misspecification of the standard money demand equation abstract this paper tests the proposition that the interest rate in the standard money demand equation acts as a proxy for the expected change in interest rates if this is true the interest elasticity in the standard equation will depend on the expectations process for interest rates using cross country data we find that there does exist a relationship between the observed interest elasticity in the standard equation and the predictability of future interest rates from current interest rates

the economics of small business finance the roles of private equity and debt markets in the financial growth cycle abstract this article examines the economics of financing small business in private equity and debt markets firms are viewed through a financial growth cycle paradigm in which different capital structures are optimal at different points in the cycle we show the sources of small business finance and how capital structure varies with firm size and age the interconnectedness of small firm finance is discussed along with the impact of the macroeconomic environment we also analyze a number of research and policy issues review the literature and suggest topics for future research

the discount window and credit availability abstract this paper models the impact of the discount window on decisions of individual banks facing regulatory capital requirements and stochastic deposit supply a central result is that banks may choose a larger lending capacity if the discount window is available than if it is not moreover if the cost of capital is higher during recessions banks may then avoid the window contributing to the downturn a discontinuous interaction emerges between risk based capital requirements and use of the discount window with a more stringent capital requirement inducing some banks to hold less capital

federal reserve operating procedures a survey and evaluation of the historical record since october 1979 comment william poole has produced another thoughtful and thought provoking paper two major conclusions emerge from his work first the instability of growth in m1b since october 1979 can be attributed largely to a reluctance by the federal reserve to permit wide enough swings in the federal funds rate second to correct this problem and to promote greater stability in financial markets and the economy the fed ought to replace lagged with contemporaneous reserve accounting and reform the discount window they should then begin to hit a nonborrowed base or reserves target that grows at a steady rate i will organize my comments around these two conclusions i will not comment directly on the other excellent paper in this session by ralph c bryant i will refer to some of bryant s empirical work though in my discussion of the poole paper poole attributes the continued extensive volatility of m1b growth since october 1979 to efforts by the federal reserve to smooth interest rates he concedes that the fed really has let go the federal funds rate to a very considerable extent but he believes that variability in m1b growth over tonger periods is due primarily to the important role accorded interest rates in federal reserve policy making italics mine he cites four reasons for believing that the post october 1979 targeting procedures qualitatively are not very different from the federal funds targeting procedure followed earlier of the four the most interesting and empirically verifiable is that in nearly one third of the weeks since october 1979 the federal funds rate has averaged within 100 basis points of either the bottom or the top of the widened target range during these weeks the constraint on the funds rate might have prevented the fed from hitting its nonborrowed reserves target poole in fact accepts this view uncritically

interest rate volatility and monetary policy in october 1979 the federal reserve shifted from an interest rate oriented operating procedure to a reserves oriented procedure it is argued in this paper that part of the very large increase in interest rate volatility which resulted from the policy switch may have been due to shifts in the parameters of the money demand equation shifts due to the adoption of a reserve aggregates operating procedure this result is derived by comparing rational expectations equilibria in a simple theoretical model under alternative policy rules this allows the variance of interest rates to be explicitly expressed as a function of the policy rule this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

do firms get the financing they want measuring credit rationing experienced by small businesses in the u s this paper measures the extent to which small businesses in the united states in the late 1980s were able to access the external credit finance they desired we argue that a comprehensive definition of credit rationing must account for both a creditworthy firms that apply for and are denied financing and b creditworthy firms that decide not to apply for desired external financing given expectations about how long it may take to obtain financing and the evolution of investment opportunities

loan collateral decisions and corporate borrowing costs we examine the relation between borrowing costs and the presence of loan collateral we find the presence of collateral increases with default risk consistent with low quality borrowers reducing their risks and borrowing costs through the use of collateral by explicitly controlling for the interdependence between the decision to pledge collateral and borrowing costs we find that secured loans have predicted spreads substantially lower than if they had been made on an unsecured basis alternatively loans made on an unsecured basis have spreads not substantially different from if they had been secured the evidence suggests that collateral pledging decisions are generally consistent with borrowing cost minimization

discount window borrowing and federal reserve operating regimes i introduction the borrowing behavior of banks at the federal reserve s discount window is a component of most models of the monetary sector including the model used by the federal reserve 1 as several researchers have noted 2 however the policy importance of accurate predictions of borrowing behavior depends on the federal reserve s short run operating procedure if the federal reserve uses a federal funds rate target to control money growth as it did in the 1970s inaccurate predictions of borrowing behavior have no effect on money supply growth if the federal reserve uses a nonborrowed reserves target as is usually assumed for the october 1979 to october 1982 period or a borrowed reserves target as was used after october 1982 then poor predictions of bank borrowing are a potentially significant source of errors in controlling money 3 given the importance of accurate borrowing predictions to monetary control under current short run operating procedures admissions by the federal reserve that its borrowing equation poorly explains recent borrowing behavior are cause for concern 4 part of the problem may lie with inadequate allowance for differences in bank borrowing behavior under different operating procedures the choice of operating procedure determines not only the importance of accurate borrowing predictions but also affects borrowing behavior by affecting the stochastic process characterizing the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate 5 the standard model for aggregate borrowing typified by goldfeld and kane 1966 assumes a positive relationship between borrowing and the spread the optimizing model of individual bank borrowing decisions of goodfriend 1983 used by cosimano 1988 and dotsey 1989 among others suggests that borrowing also depends negatively on banks expectations about future levels of the spread specifically goodfriend s model of risk neutral banks predicts a larger impact on borrowing of a spread change that banks expect to be temporary than one that banks expect to be more persistent to the extent that banks predict future spreads using an autoregressive model changes in the stochastic process characterizing the spread should change the impact realizations of the spread have on borrowing 6 moreover if banks are risk averse changes in the operating procedures that produce less predictable spreads may affect both banks borrowing and excess reserve behavior 7 because the spread s stochastic behavior depends on the federal reserve s operating procedure borrowing behavior in turn should depend on the federal reserve s operating procedure consequently the federal reserve should not assume that the borrowing equation in its model is invariant to changes in operating procedure as goodfriend notes such an assumption is another example of the lucas critique bryant 1983 and dutkowsky and foote 1988 show that borrowing equations estimated during the period when the federal reserve targeted the federal funds rate produce poor forecasts of borrowing after the regime change of 6 october 1979 these papers do not however provide evidence on how the borrowing equation changed after october 1979 one purpose of this paper is to investigate whether bank borrowing behavior changed with changes in federal reserve operating procedures leading to estimated borrowing equations that differ significantly under different operating procedures in addition to the changes in operating procedures the federal reserve also changed the reserve accounting rules in february 1984 replacing lagged reserve accounting with contemporaneous reserve accounting although the effect of this switch on bank reserve management is difficult to predict the increased uncertainty about reserve needs and the decrease in information about the aggregate demand for reserves make it plausible that banks became more conservative affecting their excess reserve behavior and their discount window borrowing

does corporate lending by banks and finance companies differ evidence on specialization in private debt contracting this paper establishes empirically the existence of specialization in private market corporate lending adding a new dimension to the public versus private debt distinctions now common in the literature comparing corporate loans made by banks and by finance companies we find that the two types of intermediaries are equally likely to finance information problematic firms however finance companies tend to serve observably riskier borrowers particularly more leveraged borrowers evidence supports both regulatory and reputation based explanations for this specialization in passing we shed light on various theories of debt contracting and intermediation and present facts about finance companies

the size of human capital externalities cross country evidence human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities however the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive the missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients or by an inappropriate level of aggregation our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model we ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view paldam 2002 is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality

the rise and decline of mancur olson s view of the rise and decline of nations author affiliation j barkley rosser jr department of economics msc 0204 james madison university harrisonburg va 22807 usa rosserjb jmu edu acknowledgment the author thanks roger r betancourt and thomas c schelling for providing either useful comments or materials and dennis coates and jac c heckelman for careful editing of earlier drafts of this paper the author is responsible for any remaining errors or misinterpretations 1 introductionalthough the first book by mancur lloyd olson jr 1the logic of collective action 1965 has been cited more often and can be viewed as more fundamentally innovative at the theoretical level its successor the rise and decline of nations 1982 has been more widely translated and is arguably the magnum opus of his career the grand application of his earlier ideas to the world and history at large 2 the earlier work laid out the problems that groups have in their collective goals as they grow larger with a greater disjuncture arising between the interests of the individual and of the collective group in the final chapter of this work he suggested that his argument could lead to an overturning of the orthodox theory of pressure groups that saw them as a positive force for democracy and efficiency luce 1924 commons 1950 special interest groups representing small numbers of firms in oligopolistic industries could support monopolistic or protectionist legislation such legislation could damage the broader economy especially groups unable to organize themselves that would then have to suffer in silence although olson rarely used the term this argument can be seen as foreshadowing the later theory of rent seeking and in his later works he more openly recognized the affinity of his ideas with the public choice school of thought 3although olson added a number of arguments two crucial innovations appear in rise and decline that underlie its central thesis one is the distinction between distributional coalitions which are seen as leading to outcomes inimical to economic growth and encompassing coalitions which are seen as potentially aiding economic growth in a society because of their greater size the latter are seen as having trouble organizing themselves and achieving influence although they might have a better chance of doing so in a smaller and more homogeneous society such as sweden olson s other innovation was his argument that over time a stable democracy will tend to create more and more distributional coalitions whose political power will accumulate thus gradually impeding the economic growth of the society this becomes the key to his most famous argument in rise and decline he especially focused on the post world war ii performance of germany and japan compared with the united kingdom he argued that the defeat of germany and japan in the war led to the overthrow of the power of narrow special interest groups that impeded growth whereas in the united kingdom such groups reached a peak of power that was responsible for the relatively weak performance of the british economy he emphasized that this was not a sudden development but that after leading the world in economic growth during the industrial revolution during the long eighteenth century 1688 1834 britain began to fall behind in the mid 19th century compared with such rising powers as germany and the united states this deceleration and relative decline only worsening in the aftermath of world war ii although he discussed a variety of other examples this was the book s central inspiring case of course even as rise and decline was being published the united kingdom began to undergo a substantial political and economic transformation during the period of rule by margaret thatcher that triggered a global movement to privatization and marketization even though britain was not invaded and did not experience a violently revolutionary upheaval

is the conventional view of discount window borrowing consistent with the behavior of weekly reporting banks discount window borrowing by weekly reporting banks disaggregated by federal reserve district is used to estimate marvin goodfriend s 1983 model of borrowed reserves little evidence is found to support the argument that a bank s borrowing decision is determined by the spread between the funds rate and the discount rate and by prior bank borrowing a weekly reporting bank has only a 2 7 percent chance of visiting the discount window during any given maintenance period this result is consistent with the presence of considerable harassment costs imposed by the discount window officer copyright 1994 by mit press

entitling the pollutee liability versus standard under private information this paper considers and compares two different legal means full liability and standard to reduce and to regulate pollution at a local level accounting for private information about benefits and costs the familiar polluter pays principle makes the polluter liable for any damage since the courts lack information about the true damage the pollutee can and presumably will overstate this damage nevertheless voluntary arrangements bypassing the courts exist e g for coasean reasons however such out of court arrangements fail to improve in many cases the inefficient allocation of pollution due to agency costs given these unsatisfactory consequences of the polluter pays principle even after allowing for contracts around the law we propose a modification of standards the pollutee is entitled that a certain standard is satisfied yet can trade this right for financial compensations contracts induced by this legal rule are countervailing the optimal mechanism switches between subsidies and payments and first best efficiency holds at both ends and this characteristic allows such a privatized standard to track the first best quite well and often better than the polluter pays principle this relative ranking under private information is the opposite of the one that holds under uncertainty here liability dominates the standard

short run monetary control evidence under a non borrowed reserve operating procedure abstract this paper examines two issues the prediction and short run control of the money stock associated with the experience following the federal reserve s adoption of a non borrowed reserve oriented operating procedure in october 1979 regarding predictability our analysis suggests that econometric models offer no improvement over the board s judgmental forecasting procedure in terms of a lower multiplier forecast error regarding the question of whether alternative operating targets would have lowered monthly variability in the money stock our findings suggest that neither a total reserve nor a monetary base operating target would have enhanced the precision of short run monetary control relative to a non borrowed reserve operating target

central bank secrecy interest rates and monetary control we construct a dynamic rational expectations model of the federal funds and deposit market that provides a rationale for central bank secrecy about current monetary aggregate objectives in this analysis the trading desk values secrecy because it reduces the influence of monetary control policy on interest rates we then examine actual u s experience with monetary control and determine that the reserve bias predicted by the model is present in the data from 1978 to 1985 finally we demonstrate that central bank secrecy may not lower the value of commercial banks

capital regulation heterogeneous monitoring costs and aggregate loan quality abstract this paper develops a banking sector framework with heterogeneous loan monitoring costs banks are exposed to the moral hazard behavior of borrowers and endogenously choose whether to monitor their loans to eliminate this exposure after analyzing an unregulated banking system we examine several cases in which regulatory capital requirements bind the notional loan supplies of various subsets of banks to gauge the impact of capital requirements we define loan quality in terms of either the ratio of monitored to total loans or the ratio of monitoring banks to total bank population under the assumption of a specific cross sectional distribution of banks our simulations show that the imposition of binding capital requirements on a previously unregulated banking system unambiguously increases the market loan rate and reduces aggregate lending but has an ambiguous effect on loan quality nevertheless once capital requirements are in place the simulations indicate that regulators can contribute to higher overall loan quality by toughening capital requirements

competition small business financing and discrimination evidence from a new survey we analyze credit applications loan denials and interest rates paid by small businesses across owner gender race and ethnicity in addition we examine data from owners who said they did not apply for credit because they believed that their applications would have been turned down after controlling for a rich set of explanatory variables including personal and business credit histories substantial differences in denial rates between firms owned by african americans and white males remain moreover consistent with becker s classic theories 1957 we find evidence that increases in competition in the firm s local banking market reduces these differences

retail bank deposits as quasi fixed factors of production neoclassical models of the banking firm for example michael klein 1971 treat all deposit liabilities as fully variable factors of production banks then maximize profits minimize liability costs by equating the marginal costs of all liability types during each period the empirical relevance of these models is difficult to establish because binding deposit rate ceilings regulation q force bank competition for many retail deposits into implicit interest channels that are not readily measured it is therefore noteworthy that during two recent periods when deposit rate ceilings were not binding banks paid retail deposit rates considerably in excess of the rate at which they could borrow via large unregulated certificates of deposit such behavior seems inconsistent with the cost minimization prescribed by neoclassical bank models however if retail deposit accounts are interpreted as quasi fixed gary becker 1962 walter oi 1962 donald parsons 1972 sherwin rosen 1968 inputs to the banking firm these important historical observations can be reconciled with bank profit maximization this paper first describes two historical episodes during which the bank retail deposit rate exceeded the negotiable certificate of deposit rate for substantial periods of time while no profit maximizing cost minimizing bank would pay such a rate differential if retail deposit quantities are costlessly variable interpreting retail deposit accounts as quasi fixed inputs to the bank explains the peculiar rate structures a simple two period model of bank liability selection formalizes the analysis i two puzzling historical episodes

bank credit rationing and the customer relation abstract this paper investigates the theory that preference in situations of bank rationing is given to those customers with the strongest customer relation it has shown that within a certainty model where competitive pressure among banks requires full compensation for other bank relationships neither deposit levels nor intertemporal demand would produce the preferential treatment claimed it has also been shown that the prime borrowers would be unable to bargain effectively for credit line protection from such occasions of credit restriction

the identification of monetary policy disturbances explaining the liquidity puzzle abstract this paper examines recent work on the identification of monetary policy disturbances its main finding is that the empirical anomalies found in the literature reflect a failure to properly address the federal reserve s policy of accommodating reserve demand shocks a new method of identifying monetary policy using nonborrowed reserves is proposed using this specification policy has a strong persistent liquidity effect regardless of subsample policy granger causes output even in the presence of interest rates explaining approximately 49 of the variance in output at a two year horizon and the residual explanatory power of interest rates for output is negligible

discount window borrowing across federal reserve districts evidence under contemporaneous reserve accounting abstract in recent years bank borrowing at the discount window has been less reliably related to the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate complicating the implementation of the borrowed reserves targeting procedure of the federal reserve this paper investigates borrowing across federal reserve districts to see if there are significant differences in borrowing behavior across bank size and discount window administrations the results suggest that borrowing behavior does differ across districts that standard borrowing models are least satisfactory in explaining the borrowing of large banks and that borrowing behavior changed after the 1987 stock market crash the gains in explanatory power from disaggregation however are not large

how do banks respond to shocks a dynamic model of deposit taking institutions abstract this paper proposes a dynamic model of the optimal choices of a bank that benefits from market power and takes into account the impact of the deposit generation process interbank lending borrowing emerges as a buffer that assists the bank in smoothing intertemporal adjustments in interdependent loan and deposit choices the bank smooths the impact of interest rates shocks on its customers to minimize the adjustments over time of the stocks of deposits and loans it does not however provide insurance against negative shocks of real origin that increase its expected default costs the predictions of the model help to shed light on the available empirical evidence and to analyze some recent developments of the banking industry

optimal environmental regulation under asymmetric information abstract a market model of environmental regulation with interdependent production and pollution abatement costs and heterogeneous firms is developed firms have private information about costs which have a quadratic form firms pursue bayes nash strategies in communication with the regulator the full information optimum cannot be attained unless gains from trade in the product market net of external damages exceed the information rents earned by firms aggregate output and externality levels are lower at the regulated equilibrium than at the full information social optimum

the banking industry under uncertain monetary policy abstract the optimal loan decisions of banks are shown to be dependent on the banks rational forecast of the future federal funds rate which in turn is related to the policy rule used by the fed consequently a change in the policy of the fed will alter the reduced form model of the banking industry this result brings into question the fed s ability to predict and control the money stock under the procedure adopted by the fed between october 1979 and september 1982

the role of common law in environmental policy comment in a recent contribution to this journal fritz sillner 1994 provides a rather harsh critic of the working of common law in environmental policy and a strict recommendation to rely on statutory law only in this field in this comment i will argue that the distinction of the small versus the large number case which is central to his argument is an oversimplification and misleading moreover i will argue that judge made law does actually play an important role as part of an environmental policy mix s6llner s line of reasoning proceeds as follows if you take a look at the state of the environment in common law countries e g usa or great britain and compare them in this respect to civil law countries e g france or germany you will not find that the former have done better on that account as should be expected following the efficiency hypothesis of common law as proposed by posner 1986 priest 1977 and others a further look will show you that opposed to their naming common law does only play a minor role in the environmental policy of the common law countries this gives according to sallner a strong indication that the alleged tendency of common law towards efficiency does not hold in this particular case he provides two explanations for this finding

can the reserves approach to monetary control really work on october 6 1979 the board of governors bog of the federal reserve system announced that the federal open market committee fomc was abandoning its historical preoccupation with an interest rate approach to monetary control in favor of a reserve aggregate approach 1 underlying this new approach is the fact that at time t any money stock concept m is the product of a money multiplier m and a reserve aggregate r that is

fixed costs and the behavior of the federal funds rate abstract this paper presents an equilibrium model of the federal funds market that ties movements in the funds rate to changes in the supply of reserves and to a fixed cost facing banks that borrow at the discount window it is found that the existence of the fixed cost is capable of explaining a number of features of the funds market in particular it is critical for explaining occasional instances of extremely high funds rates it also provides an explanation for heterogeneous behavior across banks towards the discount window and for higher average funds rates at the end of maintenance periods

dynamic monetary control and interest rate stabilization abstract interest rate stabilization results in an instrument shortage that complicates monetary control by introducing strategic considerations into the trading desk s decision problem the paper demonstrates that when expected future open market operations influence current bank and depositor behavior an instrument shortage is necessary and sufficient for the commitment policy to be time inconsistent and for the discretionary policy to be suboptimal i e worse than the commitment policy the moving average component of the commitment policy is of higher order than the discretionary policy under either regime the expected value of the representative bank is increasing in the trading desk s emphasis on interest rate stability

monetary announcements and interest rate responses there is much evidence available showing that interest rates rise in response to unexpectedly large money stock m1 announcements 3 6 12 14 15 16 some studies that have examined the interest rate response to monetary base announcements however have failed to isolate any systematic response to these surprises 4 5 such a finding warrants further consideration many believe that the monetary base is a good summary measure of monetary policy others argue that the monetary base is an accurate indicator of future inflation 7 since both a policy anticipation effect and an inflationary expectation effect have been offered to explain why money stock announcements affect interest rates it would appear that monetary base announcements should also matter the nonexistence of a monetary base announcement effect is especially difficult to understand since the monetary base for a given statement week is announced one week prior to the money stock number for that same week this suggests the financial markets may be inefficient in processing information an important aim of the present paper is to consider the information content of monetary base announcements the first section of this paper argues that the monetary base may not be the pure monetary policy indicator some suggest in particular under a lagged reserve accounting system many of the subsequent innovations in the base can be foretold by earlier money stock announcements contrary to suggestions of earlier analysis the money stock announcements are likely to lead monetary base announcements also of importance is the recognition that the monetary base includes currency and discount window borrowings since the fed does not try to exercise short term control over either of these elements of the base their movements will not reflect policy actions the analysis of monetary base announcements suggests that federal reserve announcements of discount window borrowing however may carry important information to financial markets over and above the money supply announcement while discount window borrowings are included in the monetary base it is felt that this element alone carries important information to the financial community the third section of this paper investigates whether or not the unexpected element of these borrowing announcements has an

discount window borrowing monetary policy and the post october 6 1979 federal reserve operating procedure abstract a demand schedule for discount window borrowing based on profit maximizing bank behavior is derived a feature of non price rationing at the discount window making longer duration borrowing more costly is shown to make lagged borrowing and expected future spreads between the federal funds rate and the discount rate relevant to the current borrowing decision consequently both the size of the coefficients in the borrowing functions as well as the form of the function itself depend on expected fed policy toward the spread the demand function for discount window borrowing provides the critical link by which non borrowed reserve control affects short term interest rates and ultimately the money supply under post october 6 1979 reserve targeting the analysis suggests some reasons why the fed has experienced difficulty in specifying estimating and utilizing a discount window borrowing function in the non borrowed reserve operating procedure

stochastic reserve losses bank credit expansion and bayesian information abstract in standard bank credit expansion models the optimal amount of new demand deposits to create is derived for a given level of uncertainty of reserves losses in this paper i analyze in detail the microeconomics of bank credit expansion in which the degree of uncertainty is a decision variable for the bank to determine first the role of information in adjusting the bank s expected profit is established and its impact on demand deposit creation is discussed i then derive the optimal demand for information and its comparative static behavior is examined finally i discuss the major implications of considering the level of uncertainty as a decision variable in the bank credit expansion literature

reserve accounting and variability in the federal funds market the federal funds market is analyzed under the reserve accounting procedures suggested by robert d laurent 1979 and william poole 1976 in general it is shown that the forecast error for the federal funds rate is smaller when the uncertainty arises from future random shocks however the current forecast error for the demand for money has an ambiguous impact on the forecast error for the federal funds rate under laurent or poole s procedure copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

dynamic implicit cost and discount window borrowing an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates dynamic implicit cost in aggregate discount window borrowing we utilize goodfriend s formulation with nonprice rationing based upon the bank s current request and its past borrowing record estimation by generalized method of moments reveals a positive systematic implicit cost structure which dampens over time significance extends back to nine biweekly reserve maintenance intervals we also specify implicit cost as a geometrically declining distributed lag of past borrowing and derive a semi reduced form for borrowed reserve demand empirical results support this specification as well

the growing reluctance to borrow at the discount window an empirical investigation federal reserve regulation a imposes formal guidelines on borrowing from the discount window and ensures that the facility is used for appropriate purposes in a way this regulation imposes a nonprice mechanism that compels depository institutions to be more prudent in exercising their borrowing privileges in the 1980s however banks became increasingly more reluctant to borrow adjustment credit from the discount window this behavior is puzzling because discount window guidelines have not changed this paper investigates the reasons behind the weakened demand for borrowed reserves our empirical findings suggest that the growing reluctance to borrow stems from the deteriorating financial position of banks during this period in particular banks avoided the discount window because they feared that market participants might have interpreted their visits as a signal of serious funding difficulties

the efficient production of external economies does independent market adjustment always lead to a less than pareto optimal supply of goods when there are external economies the traditional pigovian conclusion that it did has recently been rejected by some eminent economists this rejection began with a contribution in this review by james buchanan and milton kafoglis who produced examples in which independent market adjustment apparently provided optimal or even supra optimal supplies of goods with external economies and thus found the orthodox pigovian conclusion unsatisfactory their finding has been accepted by many economists including william baumol who attempted in a subsequent communication in this journal to provide a formal general explanation of their result this note will show that buchanan and kafoglis failed to call attention to the major theoretical point

protecting the environment when costs and benefits are privately known in this survey i analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction the presence of asymmetric information calls for some important departures from the textbook prescriptions of marketable permits and emission taxes for controlling pollution for instance it may no longer be optimal to equate the social marginal benefits to the marginal cost of cleanup in determining appropriate abatement levels i conclude this review with some suggestions for future research in this area

central bank secrecy fed watching and the predictability of interest rates abstract a common criticism of central bank secrecy is the assertion that it will lead to lower forecast accuracy on the part of private agents the model considered here demonstrates that reducing central bank secrecy can actually reduce the forecasting accuracy of many of the private agents in the economy when it is recognized that some agents engage in fed watching and others do not this result comes about because the interest rate process depends in part on the information that agents use in forecasting future interest rates

opacity of young businesses evidence from rating disagreements abstract a conventional wisdom in the contemporary corporate finance literature argues that small and medium sized enterprises smes are informationally opaque we use data from two credit information companies and in particular their disagreements over the creditworthiness of smes to study the empirical relevance of this often invoked assumption our panel data analysis shows that once unobserved firm effects are controlled for the disagreements i e rating splits are inversely related to the age of firms we are not able to document such a robust relationship between the disagreements and the size of firms this finding holds a lesson for empirical corporate finance researchers who need firm level proxies for informational imperfections and asymmetries of the two often used proxies firm size is not as closely related to informational opacity as firm age is

a theory of discouraged borrowers this paper examines the implications for the sme financing market of application costs that vary between firms and of imperfect screening of applicants by banks under these conditions discouraged borrowers can exist these are good borrowers who do not apply for a bank loan because they feel they will be rejected the paper shows that under a range of assumptions the scale of discouragement in an economy depends upon the screening error of the banks the scale of application costs and the extent to which the bank interest rate differs from that charged by the moneylender discouragement is shown to be at a maximum where there is some but not perfect information

small and medium size enterprises access to finance as a growth constraint abstract this paper presents recent research on access to finance by small and medium size enterprises smes smes form a large part of private sector in many developed and developing countries while cross country research sheds doubt on a causal link between smes and economic development there is substantial evidence that small firms face larger growth constraints and have less access to formal sources of external finance potentially explaining the lack of smes contribution to growth financial and institutional development helps alleviate smes growth constraints and increase their access to external finance and thus levels the playing field between firms of different sizes specific financing tools such as leasing and factoring can be useful in facilitating greater access to finance even in the absence of well developed institutions as can systems of credit information sharing and a more competitive banking structure