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Abstract
We study a credit market using an infinite horizon model where an altruistic lender offers loans to agents for production projects that may grow over time. The lender funds the loans using a combination of external debt and subsidies. The optimal way for the lender to subsidize the credit relationships depends on the probability of project growth. When growth is less likely, it is best to commit to ongoing subsidies. However, for a range of growth probabilities, ongoing subsidization may not be credible and this can have negative efficiency implications.

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that effectively bans military personnel from accessing payday loans in some states but not others. The military setting is ideal for this analysis because military personnel are assigned to locations across the United States with varying degrees of access to payday loans. Furthermore, since military personnel face varying known wait times between paycheck receipts throughout the year, I can examine daily consumption patterns in ways that were infeasible with previous datasets and surveys. I first present evidence that food expenditures spike on payday and are significantly lower at the end of a pay period; the fact that these patterns hold for perishable goods like produce indicates that food consumption is also not smooth, even over a two-week period. Then using a difference-in-difference framework, I find that payday loan access enables consumers to better smooth their consumption between paychecks, with no detectable effect on the level of food consumption. These patterns imply that payday loans enable liquidity-constrained individuals to smooth their consumption. However, I also find suggestive evidence that they lead to temptation purchases. Military personnel purchase more alcohol and electronics when given access to payday loans. Further evidence suggests that there may be significant heterogeneity in the population, with indications of present-biased preferences among some individuals and forward-looking, self controlled behavior among others.

In order to stimulate demand of their product, firms generally give credit period to their customers. However, selling on credit exposes the firms to the additional dimension of bad debts expense (i.e., customer's default). Moreover, credit period through its influence on demand becomes a determinant of inventory decisions and inventory sold on credit gets converted to accounts receivable indicating the interaction between the two. Since inventory and credit decisions are interrelated, inventory decisions must be determined jointly with credit decisions. Consequently, in this paper, a mathematical model is developed to determine inventory and credit decisions jointly. The demand rate is assumed to be a logistic function of credit period. The accounts receivable carrying cost along with an explicit consideration of bad debt expense which have been often ignored in previous models are incorporated in the present model. The discounted cash flow approach (DCF) is used to develop the model and the objective is to maximize the present value of the firm's net profit per unit time. Finally, numerical example and sensitivity analysis have been done to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.