Stephen D. Williamson

Costly monitoring, financial intermediation, and equilibrium credit rationing

This paper establishes a link between equilibrium credit rationing and financial intermediation, in a model with asymmetrically informed lenders and borrowers, costly monitoring with increasing returns to scale, and investment project indivisibilities. Intermediation dominates borrowing and lending between individuals. Equilibrium interest rates, the aggregate quantity of loans, and the size of each intermediary firm respond different to changes in taste and technology parameters, depending on whether or not there is rationing in equilibrium.

Costly Monitoring, Loan Contracts, and Equilibrium Credit Rationing

This paper develops a model with asymmetrically informed agents and costly monitoring of loan contracts, where an equilibrium can exhibit credit rationing. Borrowers are identical ex ante, but some receive loans and others do not. In contrast to existing credit rationing theories, rationing does not occur here due to inflexible prices, adverse selection or moral hazard. Optimizing behaviour produces a standard debt contract in equilibrium. The aggregate quantity of loans and equilibrium interest rates respond differently depending on whether there is rationing in equilibrium.

Financial Intermediation, Business Failures, and Real Business Cycles

In this paper, a general-equilibrium business- cycle model is construct ed that, when subjected to real disturbances, mimics observed qualita tive comovements among real output, money, business failures, risk pr emia, intermediary loans, and prices. In contrast, monetary disturban ces generate cycles that have several inconsistencies with empirical evidence, thus providing support for real business-cycle theory at th e expense of monetary theories of the business cycle. Financial inter mediation arises endogenously in the model and intermediation matters for business-cycle behavior. A credit supply mechanism acts in tande m with an intertemporal substitution effect in propagating stochastic disturbances. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

Currency Elasticity and Banking Panics: Theory and Evidence

Existing models of banking panics contain no role for monetary factors and fail to explain why some banking systems experienced panics while others did not. A monetary model is constructed, where seasonal variations in the demand for liquidity and credit play a critical role in generating banking panics. These panics occur when there are restrictions on the issue of currency in private banks, but they do not occur if banks are unrestricted. Empirical evidence from Canada and the United States for the period 1880-1910 is largely consistent with the predictions of the model.

Unemployment Insurance with Moral Hazard in a Dynamic Economy

We study a dynamic model with positive gross flows between employment and unemployment. There is moral hazard associated with search effort and job-retention effort. A quantitative comparison of the unemployment insurance system currently in place in the United States with an optimal system shows that the optimal system reduces the steady state unemployment rate by 3.40 percentage points and increases output by 3.64\%. The optimal system involves a large subsidy for a transition from unemployment to employment and a large penalty for a transition from employment to unemployment.

Moral hazard, optimal unemployment insurance, and experience rating

This paper is concerned with evaluating alternative unemployment insurance (UI) schemes in a dynamic economy with moral hazard. We consider changes in the size and duration of UI benefits, and the effects of experience rating, and use a dynamic contracting approach to determine a benchmark optimal allocation. Radical changes in the current UI system increase welfare, but not by much. A move to full experience rating has distributional effects, but the aggregate effects are negligible.

Money and Dynamic Credit Arrangements with Private Information

We construct a model with private information in which consumers write dynamic contracts with financial intermediaries. A role for money arises due to random limited participation of consumers in the financial market. Without defection constraints, a Friedman rule is optimal, the mean and variability of wealth tend to fall in the steady state, and the welfare effects of inflation are very small. With defection constraints, it is optimal to eliminate currency entirely, the variability of wealth tends to rise with inflation, and the welfare effects of inflation are large.

Money and credit with limited commitment and theft

We study the interplay among imperfect memory, limited commitment, and theft, in an environment that can support monetary exchange and credit. Imperfect memory makes money useful, but it also permits theft to go undetected, and therefore provides lucrative opportunities for thieves. Limited commitment constrains credit arrangements, and the constraints tend to tighten with imperfect memory, as this mitigates punishment for bad behavior in the credit market. Theft matters for optimal monetary policy, but at the optimum theft will not be observed in the model. The Friedman rule is in general not optimal with theft, and the optimal money growth rate tends to rise as the cost of theft falls.

Scarce collateral, the term premium, and quantitative easing

A model of money, credit, and banking is constructed in which the differential pledgeability of collateral and the scarcity of collateralizable wealth lead to a term premium — an upward-sloping nominal yield curve. Purchases of long-maturity government debt by the central bank are always a good idea, but for unconventional reasons. A floor system is preferred to a channel system, as a floor system permits welfare-improving asset purchases by the central bank.

Credit in a Random Matching Model With Private Information

We consider a random matching model without monetary exchange where agents have complete access to each others’ histories. Exchange is motivated by risk sharing given random unobservable incomes. There is capital accumulation and an endogenous interest rate. The key feature of this environment is that information is mobile across location even while goods are not. Optimal allocations in the dynamic private information resemble real-world credit arrangements in that there are credit balances, credit limits, and installment payments. The steady state has the property that there is a limiting distribution of expected utility entitlements with mobility and a positive fraction of agents who are credit constrained.