The Jaffee and Russell [1976] model of credit rationing under imperfect information and uncertainty suggests that a single-contract equilibrium will tend to occur at a point of rationing and that a multiple-contract equilibrium will likely be unstable. This paper respecifies and extends the Jaffee-Russell model to incorporate default expectations on the demand side and to consider the price of credit more appropriately to be the net (after expected default) yield rather than the contract rate. Results show rationing is not necessary in the single-contract equilibrium case, nor is an unstable equilibrium possible in the multiple-contract case.

Journal Article Imperfect Information and Credit Rationing: Comment Get access James D. Hess James D. Hess North Carolina State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 99, Issue 4, November 1984, Pages 865–868, https://doi.org/10.2307/1883129 Published: 01 November 1984

We analyze detailed longitudinal data on a cohort of males aged 58–67 in 1969–1973, a period of substantial increases in real Social Security benefits. We find the following: (1) the accelerating decline in labor force participation of elderly men in 1969–1973 can be explained by the large increase in real Social Security benefits; (2) there is evidence of a liquidity constraint effect for an important subgroup of the elderly; (3) the magnitude of this induced retirement effect is large enough that ignoring it can lead to serious underestimation of the fiscal implications of changes in benefit provisions. Our results are interpreted in the historical context of a particular cohort undergoing major, unanticipated transfers of wealth; the steady-state effects of Social Security on retirement may not be the same.

This paper examines the welfare effects of introducing storage into a market with stochastic supply in which all agents are competitive profit-maximizers with rational expectations. These welfare effects are the net result of the initial increase in demand for stock-building and the partial and asymmetric reduction in the dispersion of consumption brought about by storage. The distributional impacts depend crucially on the information available to producers before storage is introduced, the elasticity of supply, the specification of the consumption demand curve, and the cost of storage.