Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,796

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Incentive-Compatible Debt Contracts: The One-Period Problem

Gale, Douglas, Hellwig, Martin·1985·The Review of Economic Studies
DOI 10.2307/2297737
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In a simple model of borrowing and lending with asymmetric information we show that the optimal, incentive-compatible debt contract is the standard debt contract. The second-best level of investment never exceeds the first-best and is strictly less when there is a positive probability of costly bankruptcy. We also compare the second-best with the results of interest-rate-taking behaviour and consider the effects of risk aversion. Finally we provide conditions under which increasing the borrower's initial net wealth must reduce total investment in the venture.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2307/2297737

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 2 references

Cited by

See all 1,796

Metadata

Authors
Gale, D., & Hellwig, M.
Venue
The Review of Economic Studies
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
1985-10
Volume
52
Issue
4
Pages
647
ISSN
0034-6527 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2307/2297737
OpenAlex
W2140281938
Cited by
1,796
References
2
FWCI
35.66
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Incentive-Compatible Debt Contracts: The One-Period Problem. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2297737
The paper
Gale, D., & Hellwig, M. (1985). Incentive-Compatible Debt Contracts: The One-Period Problem. The Review of Economic Studies. https://doi.org/10.2307/2297737

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.