tailieunhanh - CREDIT AND BUSINESS CYCLES

You may request that consumer reporting agencies do not distribute your name on lists used by creditors and insurers to make unsolicited offers of credit and insurance. Requests can be made by telephone or in writing by filling out a form available from each credit reporting agency. For telephone requests, call (888) 5 OPT OUT to be excluded from Experian, Equifax, and Trans Union. Telephone requests last for two years; written requests are permanent. Consumers have the right to sue consumer reporting agencies, users, and providers in state and federal court for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act | The Japanese Economic Review Vol. 49 No. 1 March 1998 CREDIT AND BUSINESS CYCLES By NOBUHIRO KIYOTAKI London School of Economics and Political Science This paper presents two dynamic models of the economy in which credit constraints arise because creditors cannot force debtors to repay debts unless the debts are secured by collateral. The credit system becomes a powerful propagation mechanism by which the effects of shocks persist and amplify through the interaction between collateral values borrowers net worth and credit limits. In particular when xed assets serve as collateral I show that relatively small temporary shocks to technology or wealth distribution can generate large persistent fluctuations in output and asset prices. JEL Classification Numbers E32 E44. 1. Introduction In this paper I will explain why I believe that theories of credit are useful for understanding the mechanism of business cycles. In the 1980s and 1990s real business cycle theory has emerged as a focal point in the business cycle debate. The standard real business cycle RBC model is a competitive economy whose equilibrium corresponds to the solution of the social planner s problem the planner chooses an allocation of goods and labour to maximize the expected discounted utility of the representative agent subject to the resource constraint. The strength of the RBC approach has been to show that such a simple yet fully coherent dynamic general equilibrium model can be calibrated to match a surprisingly large number of business cycle observations especially aggregate quantities. The RBC model however has been much less successful in explaining price movements either relative or nominal. Indeed the RBC theory often neglects the problems of money and credit altogether by using the representative agent model. Moreover the RBC model needs large persistent and exogenous aggregate productivity shocks as a mainspring of fluctuations. And I find it difficult to identify such productivity shocks as