IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ecinqu/v28y1990i3p508-29.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Information Costs and the Organization of Credit Markets: A Theory of Indirect Lending

Author

Listed:
  • Staten, Michael E
  • Gilley, Otis W
  • Umbeck, John

Abstract

This paper explains indirect lending as a strategy for reducing a bank's cost of screening borrowers. Commercial banks appear to "ration" credit by rejecting some direct loan applicants, although they accept higher-risk borrowers who apply for loans indirectly through retailers. However, the more thorough credit check on direct loans causes applicants to sort themselves according to risk. Indirect applicants signal their higher risk through their choice of financing. Since banks gather more accurate information on direct applicants, the two types of contracts should differ in predictable ways. These implications are tested with Federal Reserve data on 5,000 automobile loans. Copyright 1990 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Staten, Michael E & Gilley, Otis W & Umbeck, John, 1990. "Information Costs and the Organization of Credit Markets: A Theory of Indirect Lending," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 28(3), pages 508-529, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:28:y:1990:i:3:p:508-29
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael E. Staten & John M. Barron & Andrew B. Chong, 2004. "The Emergence of Captive Finance Companies and Risk Segmentation of the Consumer Loan Market:Theory and Evidence," Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings 584, Econometric Society.
    2. John M. Barron & Byung‐Uk Chong & Michael E. Staten, 2008. "Emergence of Captive Finance Companies and Risk Segmentation in Loan Markets: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 40(1), pages 173-192, February.
    3. Jauling Tseng, 2021. "How do finance companies' advantages affect competitive strategies in short‐ and intermediate‐term loan markets? A theoretical analysis," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(3), pages 4295-4302, July.
    4. Amy Cutts & Robert Order, 2004. "On the Economics of Subprime Lending," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 167-196, November.
    5. Tseng, Jauling, 1996. "Farmer-borrowers' selection of short- and intermediate-term loan contracts: traditional lenders versus nontraditional lenders," ISU General Staff Papers 1996010108000012129, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    6. Chao Hu & Jianping Tao & Donghao Zhang & Damian Adams, 2021. "Price Signal of Tilled Land in Rural China: An Empirically Oriented Transaction Costs Study Based on Contract Theory," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-20, August.
    7. Lown, Cara & Peristiani, Stavros, 1996. "The behavior of consumer loan rates during the 1990 credit slowdown," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 20(10), pages 1673-1694, December.
    8. John S. Gonas & Michael J. Highfield & Donald J. Mullineaux, 2004. "When Are Commercial Loans Secured?," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 39(1), pages 79-99, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ecinqu:v:28:y:1990:i:3:p:508-29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/weaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.