Banks play a role in the corporate governance of firms as well as acting as debt financiers around the world. Universal …

Microfinance is generally seen as a way to fix credit markets and unleash the productive capacities of poor people who … are dependent on self-employment. The microfinance sector has grown quickly since the 1990s, paving the way for other …, generating a backlash against microfinance. This paper reconsiders the claims about microfinance, highlighting the diversity in …

Microfinance is often criticized for not adequately addressing seasonality and hard-core poverty. In Bangladesh, a … program known as PRIME was introduced in 2006 to address both concerns. Unlike regular microfinance, PRIME introduces a … microfinance scheme that offers a flexible repayment schedule and consumption smoothing, as well as production, loans. It targets …

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then … depend on low costs. This paper uses proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly … serving 80.1 million borrowers, to calculate the costs of microfinance and other elements of the microfinance business model …