In this paper we present a model of competition between informal lending and group lending. The paper is organized as follows. The second paragraph reviews the economic literature that analyzes separately group contracts and informal lending markets. The third paragraph tries to answer the...

This paper investigates how gender disparities affect the time to repay group micro-finance loans using survival analysis and hazard decomposition techniques. We also control for the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the time needed by micro-finance loan borrowers to repay. We use a large...

China has maintained a financial system with favorable treatments toward state-owned enterprises. Albeit having been denied access to formal financing such as bank loans, China's non-state firms have grown rather fast. China's experience has often been interpreted as indicating that alternative...

Using data from a new survey of small and medium-sized enterprises in Myanmar, we analyse enterprise demand for formal credit and the extent to which they are constrained in the formal credit market. We account for firms self-selecting out of the credit market in Myanmar. Our data contain...

Empirical evidence suggests that widespread financial distress, by disrupting enforcement of credit contracts, can be self-propagatory and adversely affect the supply of credit. We propose a unifying theory that models the interplay between enforcement, borrower default decisions, and the...

In recent years, an important number of impact studies have attempted to examine the effect of credit on income poverty; however, many of these studies have not paid sufficient attention to the problems of endogeneity and selection bias. The few exceptional cases have employed econometric...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the terms on bank loans and local crime rates, employing a sample of over 300,000 bank-firm relationships. Controlling for firm, market and bank characteristics the results show that where the crime rate is higher borrowers pay higher interest rates,...

In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence...

This paper extends Ghatak (1999)'s base model of group lending with asymmetric information by allowing individuals to differ both in their exogenous risk type and in their endogenous effort level. We find that joint liability leads to positive assortative matching in both a non-cooperative and a...

This paper studied the effects of credit to private non-financial sectors on income inequality. In particular, we focused on the distinction between household and firm credits, and investigated whether these two types of credit had adverse effects on income inequality. Employing cross-section...