Microfinance continues to play an ever increasing role in approaches topoverty alleviation around the world. Yet despite the attention paid tomicrofinance, the design of credit contracts for small uncollateralized loansremains a bit of a mystery. From its inception, microfinance generated agreat...

The National Health Insurance Scheme (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, RSBY) aims to improve poor people’s access to quality health care in India. This paper looks at the implementation of the scheme in Karnataka, drawing on a large survey of eligible households and interviews with empanelled...

We study an economy where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observablewealth and unobservable talent. Adverse selection forces creditors to ask forcollateral. We study the two-way interaction between rationing in the creditmarket and the wages offered in the labor market. Both pooling and...

We study market inefficiencies and policy remedies when agents choose their occupations, and entrepreneurialtalent is subject to private information. Untalented entrepreneurs depress the returns to entrepreneurshipbecause of adverse selection. The severity of this problem depends on the outside...

Effective provision of public goods is a key determinant of quality of life. Conventional approaches to poverty measurement look only at private goods, butthis view is too narrow. Access to safe drinking water, sanitation, transport,medical care, and schools is essential both as a direct...

We analyze a simple and tractable model of occupational choice in the presence of credit marketimperfections. We examine the effect of parameters governing technology and transaction costs, andhistory, in terms of the initial wealth distribution, in determining the long-term wealth...

Institutions that rely on joint liability to facilitate lending to the poor have a long historyand are now a common feature of many developing countries. Economists have proposedseveral theories of joint-liability lending that stress various aspects of its informational andenforcement advantages...