Rural indebtedness and dependence on private moneylenders is an age-old problem in India. For more than 100 years now, the Central Government and the Reserve Bank of India have been making efforts to enhance institutional credit in rural areas particularly to assist in agricultural operations....

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of easing credit constraints for rural producers in Mexico through loans provided by a national public development finance institution. In contrast to most of the existing literature, the study focuses on the effect of medium-sized loans over a two- to...

Farmers in developing countries often lack access to timely and reliable information about modern technologies that are essential to improve agricultural productivity. The recent diffusion of mobile phones has the potential to overcome these barriers by making information available to those...

How do banks respond to asset booms? This paper examines i) how U.S. banks responded to the World War I farmland boom; ii) the impact of regulation; and iii) how bank closures exacerbated the post-war bust. The boom encouraged new bank formation and balance sheet expansion (especially by new...