NBER Publications by Asim Ijaz Khwaja

The recent banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in credit intermediation. New online peer-to-peer lending markets offer opportunities to examine lending models that primarily cater to small borrowers and that generate more types of information on which to screen. This paper evaluates screening in a peer-to-peer market where lenders observe both standard financial information and soft, or nonstandard, information about borrower quality. Our methodology takes advantage of the fact that while lenders do not observe a borrower’s exact credit score, we do. We find that lenders are able to predict default with 45% greater accuracy than what is achievable based on just the borrower’s credit score, the traditional measure of creditworthiness used by banks. We further find that lenders ef...

Do liquidity shocks matter? While even a simple `yes' or `no' presents identification challenges, going beyond this entails tracing how such shocks to lenders are passed on to borrowers, and whether borrowers can in turn cushion these shocks through the credit market. This paper does so by using data that follows all loans made by lenders to borrowing firms in Pakistan, and exploiting cross-bank variation in liquidity shocks induced by the unanticipated nuclear tests in 1998. We isolate the causal impact of the bank lending channel by showing that for the same firm borrowing from two different banks, its loan from the bank experiencing a 1% larger decline in liquidity drops by an additional 0.6%. The liquidity shock also lowers the probability of continued lending to old clients and extend...