Credit without Commitment: The Implications of the Bankruptcy Law and the Determination of Public Debt

无承诺的信贷：破产法的影响和公共债务的确定

• 批准号: 0351451
• 负责人: Jose-Victor Rios-Rull
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-07-01 至 2008-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0351451&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Credit; without; Commitment; Implications; Bankruptcy

This project is about credit from the point of view of limited commitment. The main themes that inform the work are that while there are limited means to induce debtors to act as they promised, the amount of credit issued is quite large, and the instances of default are pervasive. These themes unite the two parts of this project. The first part deals with private credit and the explicit consideration of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code that grants protection from creditors essentially on demand. The proposal includes the development of theory to analyze an environment where the legal system is that of the U.S., and where all agents (households, firms) act rationally. Two features are noteworthy: unobservable consumer heterogeneity ("good" and "bad" borrowers) and contracts designed to limit the harm from taking on bad loans; and those who default here are mainly consumers with bad income shocks, in contrast with existing limited-commitment theory. This theory is applied to analyze policy changes quantitatively which in turn requires that the model is capable of accounting simultaneously for the observed amounts of credit and of default. The other part of the project deals with public debt, analyzing an environment where governments cannot commit to future policies. The work yields predictions over policy choices given a constitutional framework. The answers from both projects are very important from the point of view of the design of economic policy. In the first part alternative designs of the Bankruptcy Code are analyzed, including some reforms that have been recently discussed in the U.S. Congress, while the second part will help understand the interactions between consecutive governments and hence the implications of Constitutional limits on budget deficits and public debt. In the U.S. the Bankruptcy Code guarantees the right of citizens (recognized in Article I, section 8, of the Constitution) to file for protection against creditors. This right is mostly ignored in Economics, yet it is exercised very frequently as more than one million people file for bankruptcy in the U.S. each year. The proposed work studies, theoretically and quantitatively, an environment with an unsecured consumer credit industry with the following features: Credit-suppliers take deposits at a given interest rate and offer loans to households via a menu of credit levels and associated interest rates. The loan industry is competitive, with free entry, and borrowers have a default option that resembles, in process and consequence, a bankruptcy filing under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Of special importance is the analysis of the credit rating that households have and that is updated when households take savings and default actions. The credit score or credit rating of households is an increasingly important feature as it is used for a variety of reasons such as assessing insurance risks.The study of debt management has been centered around notions of optimality which assume the commitment of governments to future policies. In the absence of such commitment, fiscal policy is not well understood since optimal policy is not time-consistent. In particular, a canonical model shows that under commitment, the government always increases its debt in the first period, suggesting ever-increasing debt levels when there is no commitment. However, the present project is uncovering a general mechanism underlying debt management without commitment which impliesthat although government debt will tend to increase initially, there must be a limit to debtexpansion. The reason is a non-convexity that arises endogenously and naturally in these contexts.The Broader ImpactsUnderstanding credit within the framework of the U.S. legal system is a crucial ingredient for various questions such as how credit crunches operate in recessions and how differential access to credit shape people's life-long opportunities. Moreover, Congress is considering the revision of the Bankruptcy Code. The implications of the alternatives to the current Code can be analyzed with this model, including regulations of how the system of credit scores of people operate. The analysis of public debt may shape the discussions over such issues as balanced-budget amendments.

这个项目是从有限承诺的角度来研究信贷的。这项工作的主要主题是，虽然促使债务人履行承诺的手段有限，但发放的信贷数额相当大，违约情况普遍存在。 这些主题将这个项目的两个部分结合在一起。第一部分涉及私人信贷和明确考虑美国破产法，赠款保护，从债权人基本上要求。该提案包括理论的发展，以分析法律的制度是美国的环境，所有的代理人（家庭、公司）都是理性的。有两个特点值得注意：不可观察的消费者异质性（“好”和“坏”借款人）和旨在限制接受不良贷款的损害的合同;与现有的有限承诺理论相比，这里的违约者主要是受到不良收入冲击的消费者。 这一理论被应用于定量分析政策变化，这反过来又要求模型能够同时考虑到观察到的信用和违约金额。该项目的另一部分涉及公共债务，分析政府无法承诺未来政策的环境。这项工作对给定宪法框架的政策选择做出了预测。从经济政策设计的角度来看，这两个项目的答案都非常重要。第一部分分析了破产法的替代设计，包括最近在美国国会讨论的一些改革，而第二部分将有助于理解连续政府之间的相互作用，从而理解宪法限制对预算赤字和公共债务的影响。 在美国，《破产法》保障公民（宪法第一条第8款承认）申请保护以对抗债权人的权利。这一权利在经济学中大多被忽视，但它的行使非常频繁，因为每年有超过一百万人申请破产。拟议的工作研究，从理论上和定量，一个环境与无担保的消费信贷行业具有以下特点：信贷供应商采取存款在给定的利率和提供贷款家庭通过菜单的信用水平和相关的利率。贷款行业是竞争性的，可以自由进入，借款人有一个默认的选择，在过程和后果上，类似于美国破产法第7章下的破产申请。特别重要的是分析家庭拥有的信用评级，并在家庭采取储蓄和违约行动时更新。家庭的信用评分或信用等级是一个越来越重要的特征，因为它被用于评估保险风险等各种原因。债务管理的研究一直围绕着假设政府对未来政策的承诺的最优性概念。在没有这种承诺的情况下，财政政策就得不到很好的理解，因为最佳政策并不具有时间一致性。特别是，一个典型的模型表明，在承诺下，政府总是增加其债务在第一个时期，这表明不断增加的债务水平时，没有承诺。然而，目前的项目正在揭示一种普遍的机制，这种机制是在没有承诺的情况下进行债务管理的基础，这意味着尽管政府债务最初会趋于增加，但债务扩张必须有一个限度。原因是在这些背景下内生地自然产生的非凸性。更广泛的影响在美国法律的体系框架内理解信贷是各种问题的关键因素，例如信贷紧缩在经济衰退中如何运作，以及获得信贷的差异如何塑造人们的终身机会。此外，国会正在考虑修订《破产法》。可以用这个模型来分析现行《守则》替代方案的影响，包括人们信用评分系统如何运作的规定。对公共债务的分析可能会影响对平衡预算修正案等问题的讨论。