Policymakers often urge microfinance institutions to increase interest rates to eliminate reliance on subsidies. However, existing research provides little evidence on interest rate sensitivities in MFI target markets as well as little guidance on how to derive rates. MFI policymakers generally...

This paper studies how foreign investors' concerns about model misspecification affect sovereign bond spreads. We develop a general equilibrium model of sovereign debt with endogenous default wherein investors fear that the probability model of the underlying state of the borrowing economy is...

This paper is the first to empirically examine the impact of a man-made disaster on consumer credit outcomes. It uses the 2018 Merrimack Valley natural gas explosions as a quasi-random natural experiment and shows that the explosions had a temporary negative effect on debt balances, credit...

This paper describes an equilibrium life-cycle model of housing where nonconvex adjustment costs lead households to adjust their housing choice infrequently and by large amounts when they do so. In the cross-sectional dimension, the model matches the wealth distribution; the age profiles of...

This paper investigates whether small firms have experienced worse tightening of credit conditions during the Great Recession than large firms. To structure the empirical analysis, the paper first develops a simple model of bank loan pricing that derives both the interest rates on loans actually...

This study uses Japanese data to address an important shortcoming of most of the existing literature on credit availability by including a set of unlisted firms (which are the firms most likely to be bank dependent) in the analysis, and by investigating differences between the treatment of...

We analyze the issue of the impact of multiple breaks on monetary neutrality results, using a long annual international data set. We empirically verify whether neutrality propositions remain addressable (and if so, whether they hold or not), when unit root tests are carried out allowing for...

This paper extends recent research on the behaviour of the t-statistic in a long-horizon regression (LHR). We assume that the explanatory and dependent variables are generated according to the following models: a linear trend stationary process, a broken trend stationary process, a unit root...

In some advanced and emerging economies, contrary to expectations, it has been observed that increases in short-term interest rates are accompanied by increases in bank credit; a phenomenon referred to as "the loan puzzle." This study investigates, through the estimation of a structural vector...

We study the real effects of credit supply shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. To this end, we merge administrative micro-level data on the universe of bank loans to firms with matched employer-employee social security records. For each firm, we measure its exposure to time-varying...