Both formal, and informal loans matter in agriculture. But formal lenders provide much more in production lending, than do informal lenders, often at a higher cost than what they can recover. The Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), for example, providing about 90 percent of formal...

Improving rural credit markets requires a good understanding of the root causes of market failures and taking necessary steps to address them. This paper investigates the role of productivity shocks in borrowers' repayment choices. Using a framed field experiment that simulated a repeated...

This paper studies the impact of a program that provides grants for technical assistance on the interest rates and outreach of credit unions in Mexico. Credit unions financing rural borrowers received grants in different years. The study uses propensity score matching and relies additionally on...

How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender's ability to punish defaulters? This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in rural Malawi that examines the impact of fingerprinting borrowers in a context where a unique identification system is absent. Fingerprinting...

Simultaneity of borrowing, withdrawal of savings, and loan defaults due to the pronounced seasonality of agriculture often leads to investment failure of rural financial institutions. Lack of borrowing leads to lack of income- and consumption-smoothing, and in turn, causes inefficient resource...

Despite strong beliefs that property titling and registration will enhance credit access, empirical evidence in support of such effects remains scant. The gradual roll-out of computerization of land registry systems across Andhra Pradesh's 387 sub-registry offices allows us to combine quarterly...

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...

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...

This paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands? income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with...