Although the impact was less dramatic than in other Asian countries, Vietnam has been affected by the international crisis which started in 2008, resulting in a significant slowdown of economic growth. This paper aims at assessing the impact of this economic crisis on employment, unemployment...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model with technology choice and credit market imperfections, in order to investigate a possible source of underdevelopment. The model shows that a better financial infrastructure that provides stronger enforcement of contracts facilitates the...

Ireland's loan funds were a long lived, self-sustaining, large-scale microcredit organization that made millions of loans, without collateral, to the poor. We examine the life-cycle of this institution and show how the loan funds responded to their economic environment in ways that benefitted...

Exploiting new data from a survey and behavioral experiment conducted in Peru we analyze individuals’ preferences for securing income in old age. We identify a group that is unrationed by the mandate to save in Peru’s pension system, and draw insights from their affiliation and contribution...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

Hundreds of independent, local, quasi-charitable microcredit societies, or "loan funds," were lending to as many as 20% of Irish households in the mid-nineteenth century. Monitored by a central regulatory authority, funds in the system were successful in mitigating informational, moral hazard...

Les économies des pays en développement sont à la fois caractérisée par une faiblesse de l’infrastructure financière, notamment du cadre légal, et un développement important de la finance informelle. L’imperfection du cadre légal limite considérablement l'efficacité des...

Developing countries economies are well-known for both the inadequacy of the institutional framework (this is particularly relevant for the legal system) and the presence of informal nancing. The former characteristic signi cantly reduces the e¢ ciency of con- tractual mechanisms. As a result,...

Democratic Republic of Congo has known dramatic events for the last three decades. Statistical social economic data did not exist really or not available in the period. The Informal Sector survey, the second phase of the 1-2-3 survey, carried out in 2004-2005 and conducted by the National...