Incentives and the De Soto Effect
研究改善产权以促进固定资产抵押贷款的效果，发现其影响因财富群体和市场竞争程度而异，且福利收益有限。
This paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral, popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate Hernando de Soto. We use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from Sri Lanka. We show that the effects are likely to be nonlinear and heterogeneous by wealth group. They also depend on the extent of competition between lenders. There can be significant increases in profits and reductions in interest rates when credit markets are competitive. However, since these are due to reductions in moral hazard, that is, increased effort, the welfare gains tend to be modest when cost of effort is taken into account. Allowing for an extensive margin where borrowers gain access to the credit market can make these effects larger depending on the underlying wealth distribution. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.