Credit Constraints in General Equilibrium: Experimental Results.

Abstract

The authors' work attempts to investigate the influence of credit tightness or expansion on activity and relative prices in a multimarket set-up. They report on some double-action, two-market experiments where subjects had to satisfy an inequality involving the use of credit. The experiments display two regimes, characterized by high and low credit availability. The authors' main results are that changes in the availability of credit: (1) have minor and unsystematic effects on quantities and relative prices in the high-credit regime; and (2) have substantial effects, both on quantities and relative prices, in the low-credit regime. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.