This paper uses Ethiopian data to explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and its effects on farmers' resource allocation and crop productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled rural villages, largely because of...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households' dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that competition of microfinance...

The aim of this paper is to understand the mechanism underlying access to credit. The author focuses on two important aspects of rural credit markets in Thailand. First, moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks, and...

Access to transfers and credit, whether cash or in-kind, is a major source of poverty alleviation and income generation in many developing countries around the world. Women may especially benefit from transfers and credit in countries such as Bangladesh, where they often have few work...

This paper proposes an estimator for the endogenous switching regression models with fixed effects. The estimator allows for endogenous selection and for conditional heteroscedasticity in the outcome equation. Applying the estimator to a dataset on the productivity in agriculture substantially...

This paper tests the hypothesis that enterprises may forgo formal finance in lieu of informal credit by choice. They do so to avoid the additional regulatory scrutiny and harassment that engaging with the formal financial sector invites. We test this hypothesis using enterprise-level data on...

Interest in access to finance has increased significantly in recent years, as growing evidence suggests that lack of access to credit prevents lower-income households and small firms from financing high return investment projects, having an adverse effect on growth and poverty alleviation. This...

This paper reviews the current level and pattern of access to finance for India's rural poor and examines some of the key microfinance approaches in India, taking a close look at the most dominant among these, the Self Help Group (SHG) Bank Linkage initiative. It empirically analyzes the success...

Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. Most past research has focused on risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, specially on micro-level and household actions. These are risks that can been shared within a community...

China is often mentioned as a counterexample to the findings in the finance and growth literature since, despite the weaknesses in its banking system, it is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is taken as evidence that it is...