题目：Trust and Credit

时间：2024年4月17日14:00-15:30

地点：明德主楼729

汇报人：游杨（哈佛大学经济学博士；香港大学经管学院助理教授）

主持人：邝仲弘（中国人民大学经济学院讲师）

摘要：

Over the past 35 years, high-trust countries have experienced faster growth in credit to private sector. We model trust as a collective reputation to understand its role in shaping different credit growth paths. The co-existence of equilibria with different trust levels suggests distrust to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: borrowers in a "low-trust" equilibrium opting for strategic default, driving up population-average default rates and borrowing costs, forcing credit supply and switching into informal credit market, and ultimately limiting economic growth. Both country-level implications and micro-mechanisms are empirically investigated. In particular, distrust persistently predicts lower GDP growth, which can be partially explained by slower credit expansion; lower trust forces peoples credit-related activities from financial institutions to private channels, either due to narrower formal inclusion or less active adoption. Our model also rationalizes the heterogeneous effects of financial regulation tightening under different trust levels, which discourages low-trust countries from imitating financial liberalization in high-trust economies. Empirically, financial liberalization corresponds to higher GDP growth in high-trust countries but lower GDP growth in low-trust countries, implying that regulation serves as an additional mechanism for credit divergence.

个人简介：

Dr. Yang You joined the University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in finance in July 2021. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Economics from Harvard University and holds Bachelors in Mathematics and Economics from Tsinghua University. Yang You serves as a member in the CBDC expert group for HKMA, and Subcommittee on Ecosystem and Infrastructure of Task Force on Promoting Web 3 Development, leads Blockchain and Smart Contract lab at the University of Hong Kong Shenzhen. His research involves Cryptocurrency and Smart contracts, Decentralized finance, Development Economics, Culture and Economics, and Alternative data. His research has been published in Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, and NBER Macro Annual.