Loans granted by banks to several entrepreneurs jointly, but for their own individual business and/or projects, are rarely studied. Analyzing 32 million month-loan observations from the Bolivian credit register, we establish that group loans comprise a sizeable part of the formal credit market,...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...