信息和无抵押贷款的定量理论外文翻译.doc

外文翻译 A Quantitative Theory of Information and Unsecured Credit Material Source: Author: Kartik Athreya, Xuan S. Tam, Eric R. Young Over the past three decades five striking features of aggregates in the unsecured credit market have been documented: (1) rising availability of credit along both the intensive and extensive margins, (2) rising debt accumulation, (3) rising bankruptcy rates and discharge in bankruptcy, (4) rising dispersion in interest rates across households, and (5) the emergence of a discount for borrowers with good credit ratings. We show that all five outcomes are quantitatively consistent with improvements in the ability of lenders to observe borrower characteristics. Part of our contribution is the development of an algorithm for computing equilibria with asymmetric information and individualized pricing. From a welfare perspective, our main finding is that more information is better exante, even though better information can rule out pooling outcomes that some groups might find beneficial ex post. 1 Introduction For most of the postwar period the unsecured market for credit has been small. Ellis(1998) shows that truly unsecured credit (credit card and related plans issued by insured banks) did not appear in any significant amount until the late 1960s. Furthermore, as Figure (1) shows the filing rate for Chapter 7 bankruptcy over the past 70 years was flat and very low until the late 1970s, reflecting the absence of significant unsecured indebtedness. However, over the past three decades there have been dramatic changes in this market. First, the availability of unsecured credit has increased both along the extensive and intensive margin; Narajabad (2007) documents that the fraction of US households with positive credit card limits increased by 17 percentage points between 1989 and 2004, while the average credit limit more than doubled over the same time period；In addition to the increase in availability of credit, Krueger and Perri (2006) measu