This paper considers the role of infrastructure investment in the economic development of the regions of overseas European settlement in the 19th century. Its premise is that the pattern of investment in general, and the roles of public intervention and external finance in particular, were consequences of the structure of financial markets in countries in the early stages of economic development. Government intervention, external finance and debt-servicing difficulties were correlates of the financial-market imperfections that gave rise to informational asymmetries, moral hazard and adverse selection, while government policies to overcome asymmetric information encouraged management to engage in bankruptcy for profit. The tradeoff between credit rationing and bankruptcy for profit is at the heart of the paper.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of California at Berkeley in its series Economics Working Papers with number
94-230.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)