as well as seminar participants at Michigan State for helpful comments and conversations. We thank Mrithyunjayan Nilayamgode for excellent research assistance. Korinek gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

No abstract

We characterize the equilibrium set of a two-good, pure-credit economy with limited commitment, under both pairwise and centralized meetings. We show that the set of equilibria derived under "not-tootight" solvency constraints (Alvarez and Jermann, 2000) commonly used in the literature is of measure zero in the whole set of Perfect Bayesian Equilibria. There exist a continuum of stationary equilibria, a continuum of endogenous credit cycles of any periodicity, and a continuum of sunspot equilibria, irrespective of the assumed trading mechanism. Equilibria featuring "too-tight" solvency constraints can generate growing credit limits over time, periodic credit shutdowns, and heterogeneous debt limits across ex-ante identical borrowers. Moreover, we provide examples of credit cycles that dominate, from a social welfare point of view, all equilibria with "not-too-tight" solvency constraints.

We model asset issuance in over-the-counter markets. Investors buy newly issued assets in a primary market and trade existing assets in a secondary market, where both markets are over the counter. We show that the level of asset issuance and its efficiency depend on how investors split the surplus in secondary market trade. If buyers get most of the surplus in secondary market trade, then sellers do not have incentives to participate in the primary market in order to intermediate assets and the economy has a low level of assets. On the other hand, if sellers get most of the surplus, buyers have strong incentives to participate in the primary market and the economy has a high level of assets. Equilibrium is inefficient for any splitting rule. The result follows from a double-sided hold-up problem in which it is impossible for all investors to take into account the full social value of an asset when trading. We propose a tax/subsidy scheme and show how it restores efficiency. We calibrate our model to match features of the US municipal bond market in order to quantify the effects of the intervention.The intervention leads to large welfare gains and, in response to a financial crisis caused by an aggregate demand shock, makes the crisis less severe and shorter relative to the economy with no intervention. JEL Classification: D53, D82, G14

No abstract