Essays on financial intermediation and development

This thesis applies contract theory to topics of financial intermediation. Chapter 1 studies the effects of imperfect legal enforcement on optimal project financing contracts. It departs from an environment that combines asymmetric information about cash flows and limited commitment by borrowers. Incentive for repayment comes from the possibility of liquidation of projects by a court, but courts are costly and may fail to liquidate. These ingredients make it possible to evaluate how interest rates and amounts of credit respond jointly to variations in the reliability of courts. Examples reveal that costly use of courts may be optimal, but both asymmetric information and uncertainty about courts are necessary conditions for legal punishments ever to be applied. Numerical solutions for several parameterizations show wealthier individuals borrowing with lower interest rates and running higher scale enterprises, which is consistent with stylized facts. High reliability of courts has a consistently positive effect on investment. However its effect on interest rates is subtler and depends essentially on the degree of curvature of the production function.; Chapter 2 creates a dynamic theory of endogenous risk sharing groups, with good internal information, and their coexistence with relative performance, individualistic regimes, which are informationally more opaque. Inequality and organizational form are determined simultaneously. Numerical techniques and succinct re-formulations of mechanism design problems with suitable choice of promised utilities allow the computation of a stochastic steady state and its transitions. Regions of low inequality and moderate to high wealth (utility promises) produce the relative performance regime, while regions of high inequality and low wealth produce the risk sharing group regime. If there is a cost to prevent coalitions, risk sharing groups emerge at high wealth levels also. Transitions from the relative performance regime to the group regime tend to occur when rewards to observed outputs exacerbate inequality, while transitions from the group regime to the relative performance regime tend to come with a decrease in utility promises. Some regions of inequality and wealth deliver long term persistence of organization form and inequality, while other regions deliver high levels of volatility.