There is widespread evidence supporting the conjecture that borrowing constraints have important implications for firm growth and survival.In this paper we model a multi-period borrowing/lending relationship with asymmetric information.We show that borrowing constraints emerge as a feature of the optimal long-term lending contract, and that such constraints relax as the value of the borrower's claim to future cash-flows increases.We also show that the optimal contract has interesting implications for firm dynamics.In agreement with the empirical evidence, as age and size increase, mean and variance of growth decrease, firm survival increases, and the sensitivity of investment to cash-flows declines.

There is widespread evidence supporting the conjecture that borrowing constraints have important implications for firm growth and survival. In this paper we model a multiperiod borrowing/lending relationship with asymmetric information. We show that borrowing constraints emerge as a feature of the optimal long-term lending contract, and that such constraints relax as the value of the borrower's claim to future cash flows increases. We also show that the optimal contract has interesting implications for firm dynamics. In agreement with the empirical evidence, as age and size increase, mean and variance of growth decrease, and firm survival increases.

Poor countries have lower PPP-adjusted investment rates and face higher relative prices of investment goods. It has been suggested that this happens either because these countries have a relatively lower TFP in industries producing capital goods or because they are subject to greater investment distortions. This paper provides a micro-foundation for the cross-country dispersion in investment distortions. We first document that firms producing capital goods face a higher level of idiosyncratic risk than their counterparts producing consumption goods. In a model of capital accumulation where the protection of investors' rights is incomplete, this difference in risk induces a wedge between the returns on investment in the two sectors. The wedge is bigger, the poorer the investor protection. In turn, this implies that countries endowed with weaker institutions face higher relative prices of investment goods, invest a lower fraction of their income, and end up being poorer. We find that our mechanism may be quantitatively important.

The data show that, upon being hit by adverse profitability shocks, large public firms have ample latitude to divest their least productive assets, reducing the risk faced by shareholders and the returns that they are likely to demand. In the one‐factor production‐based asset pricing model, when the frictions to capital adjustment are shaped to respect the evidence on investment, the model‐generated cross‐sectional dispersion of returns is only a small fraction of that documented in the data. Our conclusions hold even when operating or labor leverage is modeled in ways shown to be promising in the extant literature.