Working Paper: NBER ID: w13209
Authors: Kiminori Matsuyama
Abstract: Credit market imperfections provide the key to understanding many important issues in business cycles, growth and development, and international economics. Recent progress in these areas, however, has left in its wake a bewildering array of individual models with seemingly conflicting results. This paper offers a road map. Using the same single model of credit market imperfections throughout, it brings together a diverse set of results within a unified framework. In so doing, it aims to draw a coherent picture so that one is able to see some close connections between these results, thereby showing how a wide range of aggregate phenomena may be attributed to the common cause. They include, among other things, endogenous investment-specific technical changes, development traps, leapfrogging, persistent recessions, recurring boom-and-bust cycles, reverse international capital flows, the rise and fall of inequality across nations, and the patterns of international trade. The framework is also used to investigate some equilibrium and distributional impacts of improving the efficiency of credit markets. One recurring finding is that the properties of equilibrium often respond non-monotonically to parameter changes, which suggests some cautions for studying aggregate implications of credit market imperfections within a narrow class or a particular family of models.
Keywords: credit market imperfections; business cycles; growth; inequality; international economics
JEL Codes: E32; E44; F15; F36; O11; O16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Wealth distribution (D31) | Credit allocation (E51) |
| Credit allocation (E51) | Investment levels (G31) |
| Misallocation of credit (E51) | Economic stability (E60) |
| Credit access (G21) | Volatility (E32) |
| Credit access (G21) | Household wealth distribution (G59) |