IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/2015.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Agency Costs, Collateral, and Business Fluctuations

Author

Listed:
  • Ben S. Bernanke
  • Mark Gertler

Abstract

Bad economic times are typically associated with a high incidence of financial distress, e.g., insolvency and bankruptcy. This paper studies the role of changes in borrower solvency in the initiation and propagation of the business cycle. We first develop a model of the process of financing real investment projects under asymmetric information, extending work by Robert Townsend. A major conclusion here is that when the entrepreneurs who borrow to finance projects are more solvent (have more "collateral"), the deadweight agency costs of investment finance are lower. This model of investment finance is then embedded in a dynamic macroeconomic setting. We show that, first, since reductions in collateral in bad times increase the agency costs of borrowing, which in turn depress the demand for investment, the presence of these financial factors will tend to amplify swings in real output. Second, we find that autonomous factors which affect the collateral of borrowers (as in a "debt-deflation") can actually initiate cycles in output.

Suggested Citation

  • Ben S. Bernanke & Mark Gertler, 1986. "Agency Costs, Collateral, and Business Fluctuations," NBER Working Papers 2015, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2015
    Note: EFG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w2015.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Williamson, Stephen D, 1987. "Financial Intermediation, Business Failures, and Real Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(6), pages 1196-1216, December.
    2. Greenwald, Bruce & Stiglitz, Joseph E & Weiss, Andrew, 1984. "Informational Imperfections in the Capital Market and Macroeconomic Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(2), pages 194-199, May.
    3. Douglas W. Diamond, 1984. "Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 51(3), pages 393-414.
    4. Selden, Larry, 1978. "A New Representation of Preferences over "Certain A Uncertain" Consumption Pairs: The "Ordinal Certainty Equivalent" Hypothesis," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(5), pages 1045-1060, September.
    5. Townsend, Robert M., 1979. "Optimal contracts and competitive markets with costly state verification," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 265-293, October.
    6. Bengt Holmstrom, 1979. "Moral Hazard and Observability," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 74-91, Spring.
    7. Sappington, David, 1983. "Limited liability contracts between principal and agent," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 1-21, February.
    8. Douglas Gale & Martin Hellwig, 1985. "Incentive-Compatible Debt Contracts: The One-Period Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 52(4), pages 647-663.
    9. HOLMSTROM, Bengt, 1979. "Moral hazard and observability," LIDAM Reprints CORE 379, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    10. Kydland, Finn E & Prescott, Edward C, 1982. "Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(6), pages 1345-1370, November.
    11. Long, John B, Jr & Plosser, Charles I, 1983. "Real Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(1), pages 39-69, February.
    12. Hamilton, James D., 1987. "Monetary factors in the great depression," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 145-169, March.
    13. Nigel Tomes, 1985. "Income Distribution, Happiness and Satisfaction: A Direct Test of the Interdependent Preferences Model," University of Western Ontario, Departmental Research Report Series 8507, University of Western Ontario, Department of Economics.
    14. King, Robert G & Plosser, Charles I, 1984. "Money, Credit, and Prices in a Real Business Cycle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 363-380, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Goodhart, Charles, 1989. "The Conduct of Monetary Policy," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 99(396), pages 293-346, June.
    2. Athreya, Kartik B., 2014. "Big Ideas in Macroeconomics: A Nontechnical View," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262019736, December.
    3. Dang, Viet Anh, 2010. "Optimal financial contracts with hidden effort, unobservable profits and endogenous costs of effort," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(1), pages 75-89, February.
    4. Santos, Joao C., 1997. "Debt and equity as optimal contracts," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 355-366, December.
    5. Acharya, Viral & Naqvi, Hassan, 2012. "The seeds of a crisis: A theory of bank liquidity and risk taking over the business cycle," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(2), pages 349-366.
    6. Jin, Yi & Zeng, Zhixiong, 2014. "Banking risk and macroeconomic fluctuations," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 350-360.
    7. Mario Tirelli, 2017. "Optimal Financial Contracts With Unobservable Investments," Departmental Working Papers of Economics - University 'Roma Tre' 0230, Department of Economics - University Roma Tre.
    8. Chowdhry, Bhagwan, 2000. "Defaults and interest rates in international lending," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 8(3-4), pages 333-345, July.
    9. Fabio ALESSANDRINI, 2003. "Introducing Capital Structure in a Production Economy: Implications for Investment, Debt and Dividends," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 03.03, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    10. Lawrence J. Christiano & Roberto Motto & Massimo Rostagno, 2003. "The Great Depression and the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, pages 1119-1215.
    11. Zhixiong Zeng, 2013. "A theory of the non-neutrality of money with banking frictions and bank recapitalization," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 52(2), pages 729-754, March.
    12. Ghossoub, Mario, 2010. "Supplement to "Belief heterogeneity in the Arrow-Borch-Raviv insurance model"," MPRA Paper 37717, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 22 Mar 2012.
    13. Conning, Jonathan & Udry, Christopher, 2007. "Rural Financial Markets in Developing Countries," Handbook of Agricultural Economics, in: Robert Evenson & Prabhu Pingali (ed.), Handbook of Agricultural Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 56, pages 2857-2908, Elsevier.
    14. Ross Levine & Norman Loayza & Thorsten Beck, 2002. "Financial Intermediation and Growth: Causality and Causes," Central Banking, Analysis, and Economic Policies Book Series, in: Leonardo Hernández & Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel & Norman Loayza (Series Editor) & Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel (Se (ed.),Banking, Financial Integration, and International Crises, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 2, pages 031-084, Central Bank of Chile.
    15. Mark Gertler, 1988. "Financial structure and aggregate economic activity: an overview," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, pages 559-596.
    16. Bracha Meth, 1996. "Reduction of Outcome Variance: Optimality and Incentives," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(1), pages 309-328, March.
    17. Aadland, David, 2005. "Detrending time-aggregated data," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 89(3), pages 287-293, December.
    18. Alexander Monge-Naranjo & Javier Cascante & Luis J. Hall, 2001. "Enforcement, Contract Design, and Default: Exploring the Financial Markets of Costa Rica," Research Department Publications 3126, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    19. Patrick Artus, 1993. "Crises financières et cycle réel : Le rôle des imperfections du marché du crédit," Revue d'Économie Financière, Programme National Persée, vol. 26(3), pages 89-107.
    20. Philip Lowe & Thomas Rohling, 1993. "Agency Costs, Balance Sheets and the Business Cycle," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp9311, Reserve Bank of Australia.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2015. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.