Optimal Financial Exclusion

We study efficient exclusion policies in a canonical credit model that features both exogenous and strategic default along the equilibrium path. Policies that maximize welfare in a stationary equilibrium implement exclusion for a finite and deterministic number of periods following default. Front-loading exclusion makes the mass of socially valuable transactions as high as it can be in steady state. Less intuitively, doing so also maximizes the average welfare of excluded agents in equilibrium conditional on the level of incentives provided by the threat of exclusion. We argue that these results are robust to a host of natural variations on our benchmark model. (JEL C73, D53, D86, G21, G32, G51)

Disrupted lending relationship and borrower's strategic default: evidence from the tourism industry during the Greek economic crisis

Using a sample of bank loans to firms operating in the tourism industry for the period 2010-2015, and regional variation of tourism activities to identify the strategic defaulted firms, we examine the impact of Greek banks consolidation on the firms’payment behavior. We show that a merger-induced impairment of the lending relationship is related to a higher likelihood of strategic default by the target bank’s borrowers. In contrast, mergers with a limited impact on the lending relationship have no effect on the probability of strategic default of target bank’s borrowers. The results highlight the importance of relationship lending benefits in strategic default decisions. Our findings are robust to the alternative interpretation of soft budget constraints.

SEQUENTIAL GROUP LENDING WITH AND WITHOUT GROUP LIABILITY; GRAMEEN I VERSUS GRAMEEN II

The paper shows that in absence of any physical collateral, sequential group lending with joint-liability fails to guarantee loan repayment by borrowers because of the coordination problem among the borrowers. The model finds that under certain conditions, profits can be higher under joint-liability group lending if one can ensure peer pressure is adequate to guarantee there is no strategic default, i.e., repayment when the borrower has earned enough to be able to repay. From the lender’s point of view, the individual lending contract may turn out to be a better option than joint-liability group lending under certain circumstances.