Divergent risk-attitudes and endogenous collateral constraints

Abstract

Financial crises are anticipated by leverage build-up and asset price booms and followed by sharp de-leveraging and asset price burst. Leverage pro-cyclicality, debt margins counter-cyclicality and heightened asset price volatility are often hard to reconcile with credit frictions models, with and without occasionally binding constraints. We show that a model in which the anticipatory effects of occasionally binding collateral constraints interact with borrowers' time-varying risk-attitudes (modeled through gain-loss reference dependent utilities) and with borrowers/lenders risk-attitudes heterogeneity can explain those facts. Simulations through global methods show that the model can also match numerous statistics characterizing the asset price and leverage cycles.