Financial Matching, Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurial Risk Taking

We study financial matching in credit markets when entrepreneurs have private information about their success potential. Entrepreneurs can search for financing for either a “risky” or a “safe” investment and only the risky project is sensitive to entrepreneurs' intrinsic “types”. There is excess risk taking in the sense that entrepreneurs with inefficiently low success probabilities choose the risky investment. However, steady states featuring greater market liquidity are associated with higher efficiency. As market liquidity also reflects the intensity of competition among financiers, earlier results which indicate a negative relationship between competition and allocative efficiency do not hold in our setup.