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Financial Fragility and Economic Performance

Bernanke, Ben, Gertler, Mark·1990·The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Abstract

Financial stability is an important goal of policy, but the relation of financial stability to economic performance and even the meaning of the term itself are poorly understood. This paper explores these issues in a theoretical model. We argue that financial instability, or fragility, occurs when entrepreneurs who want to undertake investment projects have low net worth; the heavy reliance on external finance that this implies causes the agency costs of investment to be high. High agency costs in turn lead to low and inefficient investment. Standard policies for fighting financial fragility can be interpreted as transfers that maintain or increase the net worth of potential borrowers.

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Metadata

Authors
Bernanke, B., & Gertler, M.
Venue
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Published
1990-02
Volume
105
Issue
1
Pages
87
ISSN
0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2148347284
Cited by
926
References
0
FWCI
33.37
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Financial Fragility and Economic Performance. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2937820
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Bernanke, B., & Gertler, M. (1990). Financial Fragility and Economic Performance. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/2937820

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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.