Financial interlinkage, in the form of cross-holding of equity and debtbetween firms, characterizes business groups in many countries. We suggestthat such financial interlinkage can be viewed as a way to solve creditrationing caused by asymmetric information. If firms possess better...

Institutions that rely on joint liability to facilitate lending to the poor have a long historyand are now a common feature of many developing countries. Economists have proposedseveral theories of joint-liability lending that stress various aspects of its informational andenforcement advantages...

This paper analyzes how group lending programs use joint liability to utilize localinformation that borrowers have about each other’s projects through self-selection of groupmembers in the group formation stage. These schemes are shown to lead to positiveassortative matching in group...