مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بازارهای اعتباری تحت عدم تقارن اطلاعاتی – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

This paper explores asymmetric information regarding the law in credit markets. The law and judicial system are assumed to be unambiguous and reliable so that the decisions are foreseeable to everyone who has legal expertise. The problem is that legally-naive lenders lack legal expertise. The law often provides special protection to a few debt categories. La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer (1998), for example, mention that in many countries payments to secured lenders are subordinated to payments to the government and workers, who have absolute priority. These laws may cause unexpected losses to legally-naive lenders whose loans are fully secured. In the UK, the law offers several orders of seniority between secured loans (Franks & Sussman, 2005). Payments to fixed charge security holders are, for instance, senior to the payments to lenders that have floating charge security. The latter lenders may suffer unexpected losses if they are legally-naive and assume that the floating charge security protects their investments. One legal attribute that may strongly reduce the market value of the collateral asset and thereby cause unexpected losses to legally-naive lenders is an encumbrance (Glen, 2011). In the US, the homestead exemption protects guarantors in most states and varies strongly among states (Gropp, Scholz, & White, 1997). The value of personal guarantee may be 1 million dollars if the guarantor lives in state A, or zero if they live in state B. The latter scenario may cause unexpected losses to lenders. Developing countries have more problems. The ownership of the collateral asset may be unclear (de Soto, 2000; Glen, 2011).1 The law in the jurisdiction may be obscure or overly complicated (de Soto, 2000; Glen, 2011). In an informal property system, titling requirements and issues of enforceability will be based on community norms and local knowledge. An outside lender may have neither the knowledge nor ready access to peculiar local information or knowledge (de Soto, 2000; Glen, 2011). Consequently, direct investments by legally-naive lenders may lead to dramatic losses and the non-intermediated market may dry up as a result. These examples raise fundamental questions. What are the impacts of asymmetric information regarding the law in credit markets? How does it differ from the standard form of asymmetric information? How can it be eliminated?