Risk Rationing and Wealth Effects in Credit Markets: Theory and Implications for Agricultural Development

Abstract

We develop a model that shows that asymmetric information can result in two types of credit rationing: conventional quantity rationing, and "risk rationing," whereby farmers are able to borrow but only under high-collateral contracts that offer them lower expected well-being than a safe, subsistence activity. After exploring its incidence with respect to wealth, we show that risk rationing has important policy implications. Specifically, land titling will be only partially effective because it does not enhance producers' willingness to offer up the collateral needed to secure loans under moral hazard constraints. Efforts to enhance agricultural investment and the working of agricultural credit markets must step beyond land titling and also deal with risk.Key words: asymmetric information, credit rationing, land titling, moral hazard, risk rationing.In a competitive world of symmetric information and costless enforcement, credit contracts could be written conditional on borrower behavior. Borrowers would then have access to loans under any interest rate-collateral combination that would yield lenders a zero expected profit. However, as a large literature has shown, information asymmetries and enforcement costs make such conditional contracting infeasible and restrict the set of available contracts, eliminating as incentive incompatible high interest rate, low collateral contracts.1 This contraction of contract space can result in quantity rationing in which potential borrowers who lack the wealth to fully collateralize loans are involuntarily excluded from the credit market and thus prevented from undertaking higher return projects. This paper theoretically demonstrates that the contraction of contract space induced by asymmetric information can result in another form of nonprice rationing, one that we label "risk rationing." Risk rationing occurs when

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