This paper assesses how legal origin influences financial development through regulation quality and the rule of law. It employs all the dimensions identified by the Financial Development and Structure Database of the World Bank. The law channels are instrumented with legal origins to account...

This paper examines the effects of providing financial services to low-income individuals on entrepreneurial activity, employment, and income. The analysis exploits cross-time and cross-municipality variation in the opening of Banco Azteca in Mexico to measure these effects with a...

This paper evaluates effectiveness of microfinance using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method applied to data collected in a recent randomized control trial. This method allows one to answer an additional set of questions not answered by the original study and provide more nuanced evidence by...

This paper examines the effects of providing financial services to low-income individuals on entrepreneurial activity, employment, and income. The analysis exploits cross-time and cross-municipality variation in the opening of Banco Azteca in Mexico to measure these effects with a...

This study investigates the legitimacy of the relatively high interest rates charged by those microfinance institutions (MFIs) which have been transformed into regulated commercial banks using information garnered from a panel of 1232 MFIs from 107 developing countries. Results show that...

This study provides insights into the sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Africa with specific emphasis on documented measures of MFI sustainability, stylized facts surrounding the phenomenon, perspectives on the growth of MFIs, determinants of the growth of MFIs and the impact...

This edited volume provides a critical evaluation of financing options for sustainable development in Africa. While sustainability has long been the watchword for development programs, and while many African countries have taken initiatives to develop integrated frameworks that tackle...

This study compares the responsiveness of microcredit interest rates to age, scale of lending and organisational charter. It uses an unbalanced panel of 300 MFIs from 107 developing countries from 2005 to 2015. Three key trends emerge from the results of a 2SLS regression. First, the adoption of...