Asymmetric group loan contracts: experimental evidence
Francesco Carli et al.
What the paper says
We design an experiment to study the effect of asymmetry in the context of group lending with joint liability. The performance of group loan contracts crucially hinges on borrowers engaging in peer monitoring and the common practice is to offer participants of a group loan symmetric contract terms. Our experiment shows that asymmetric contracts, in which monitoring is a dominant strategy for one borrower, increase the monitoring rate, and thus the repayment rate, without leaving borrowers substantially worse off. In addition, asymmetric contracting also raises expected profits of the lending institution. Overall, our experiment reveals that asymmetric group loan contracts are worth considering as part of a policy to maintain both financial stability and higher lender profits.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.