Working it out: Randomized Modification and Entrepreneurial Effort in a Collateralized Debt Market

For helpful comments, we thank Vedant Agarwal, Deniz Aydin, Ben Iverson, Victor Lyonnet, Pascal Noel, Avantika Pal, Ryan Pratt, Janis Skrastins, Jack Willis, Yufeng Wu; seminar participants at Brown, Duke (Fuqua), MIT, Northwestern, Northwestern (Kellogg), NYU, Rice (Jones), The College of Mexico, The JP Morgan Chase Institute, USC (Marshall), Vanderbilt; and conference participants at NBER Summer Institute, Chicago Household Finance Conference, Colorado Finance Summit, ISB Summer Finance Conference, IGC/Yale Firms Trade and Development Conference, London Business School Summer Symposium, Chicago Entrepreneurship Workshop, RAPS/RCFS Europe Conference, Holden Conference in Finance and Real Estate, Red Rock Finance Conference, Managing in Emerging Markets Conference, Columbia Management, Analytics and Data Conference, and IPA-GPRL Research Gathering. We also thank Jialu Sun and Luke Wisniewski for the excellent research assistance. We used refine.ink for copyediting suggestions, and Claude to cross-check some of our literature reviews and code. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Dartmouth Rockefeller Center, the Financial Institutions and Markets Research Center at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, Fuqua School of Business Dean’s Fund and the Crown Fund at Duke University. Special thanks to the management and staff of the cooperating lender for implementing the experimental protocols and sharing data. We pre-registered the field experiment component of this study as AEARCTR-0013052. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• May 1, 2026