We explore the effects of mandatory third-party review of mortgage contracts on the terms, availability, and performance of mortgage credit. Our study is based on a legislative pilot carried out by the State of Illinois in a selected set of zip codes in 2006. Mortgage applicants with low FICO...

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) lend to the poor, fostering these individuals’ financial inclusion. However, microfinance clients suffer from high interest rates, a type of poverty penalty. Reducing margins and lowering interest rates should be a target for MFIs with a strong social...

The lack of access to financial services and to credit in particular is an issue in many developing countries. This paper studies the channels through which new borrowers get access to consumer loans and the effect of repayment data distribution both on that access and on subsequent bank...

Economist usually think and work taking into account the temporal dimension of economic and financial processes. Time plays a key role in the economic decision making process and is a fundamental input for statistical models useful to analyze and predict social behavior. Thus time invades our...

Economic theory and recent empirical evidence suggest that access to savings, payment and credit services can play a key role in poverty alleviation. Despite this, significant financial exclusion persists across sub-Saharan Africa. By pooling eleven nationally representative surveys, this paper...

This paper investigates the farm-household decisions of adopting and abandoning higher-productivity technologies, under different scenarios of inclusion into the credit and deposit markets. The financial environment is further characterized by shallow financial markets, represented by a...

EM Asia has seen a transformation of its monetary policy environment over the past 2 decades. By far, the most relevant change has been the maturing of its financial systems and the growing relevance of the global financial cycle: financial inclusion has spread, financial markets have deepened...

The report takes a comparative look at ADB and OECD experiences, and aims to identify promising policy solutions for creating an SME base that is resilient to crisis, from a viewpoint of access to finance, and which can help drive growth and development.

The Asia SME Finance Monitor 2013 is the knowledge sharing product on SMEs in Asia and the Pacific, specially focusing on SME access to finance. The Monitor reviews various country aspects of SME finance covering the banking sector, nonbank sector, and capital markets. It is expected to support...