Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned...

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...

Slow money, or patient nurturing capital invested locally in food and basic industries, is a new term but an old notion. This paper examines the cases of the CIGALES clubs of microangels in France and the more recent case of the slow money alliance to ferret out the basic principles and...

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g. unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....

We explore the effect of foreign direct investment on economic growth in developing countries, distinguishing between mergers and acquisitions (“M&As”) and “greenfield” investment. A simple model underlines that, unlike greenfield investment, M&As partly represent a rent accruing to...

How do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations? This paper addresses the issue by exploiting a unique database released by a Senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives sharing identical governance characteristics and placed...

This paper is the first to draw a global picture of worldwide microfinance equity by taking full advantage of daily quoted prices. We revisit previous findings showing that investors should consider microfinance as a self-standing sector. Our results are threefold. First, microfinance has become...