Technological Determinants of Financial Constraints

This paper was previously entitled “Optimal Agents.” The author thanks Gustavo Manso (the editor), an anonymous associate editor, and two anonymous referees. The author is deeply grateful to Alex Edmans, Denis Gromb, and Christopher Hennessy for their generous and invaluable guidance. He also gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from Tyler Abbot, Charles Angelucci, Taylor Begley, Bo Bian, Patrick Bolton, Philip Bond, Yasser Boualam, Max Bruche, Alvin Chen, Olivier Darmouni, James Dow, Darrell Duffie, Bernard Dumas, Maryam Farboodi, Daniel Ferreira, Paolo Fulghieri, Mariassunta Giannetti, Francisco Gomes, Alexander Guembel, Deeksha Gupta, Marina Halac, Benjamin Hébert, Yunzhi Hu, Naveen Khanna, Ralph S. J. Koijen, Lukas Kremens, Howard Kung, John Kuong, Augustin Landier, Ye Li, Peter Limbach, Vincent Maurin, Jean-Marie Meier, Thomas Noe, Marcus M. Opp, Anna Pavlova, Paul Pfleiderer, Giorgia Piacentino, Tomasz Piskorski, Andrea Prat, Georgii Riabov, Kunal Sachdeva, José Scheinkman, David Schoenherr, Amit Seru, Joel Shapiro, Janis Skrastins, Per Strömberg, Vikrant Vig, Ming Yang, Jeffrey Zwiebel, and seminar participants at London Business School, the 2016 HEC Finance Ph.D. Workshop, Princeton University, the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Tilburg University, the Stockholm School of Economics, INSEAD, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Cologne, the 2019 Financial Intermediation Research Society Conference, the 2019 Marstrand Finance Conference, Humboldt University of Berlin, and BI Norwegian Business School.