This paper uses a real-options model of a farming operation to show how standard loan contracts create incentives for farmers to focus on short-term financial performance at the expense of the farm's long-term natural capital. These incentives are a manifestation of the debt overhang problem....

Credit reporting systems have become a widespread tool to assess the creditworthiness of prospective borrowers. This paper studies the implications for credit access of using them in contexts where exogenous and transitory shocks affect income and repayment. Using a novel administrative data set...

This paper studies how weather variability affects credit scores and credit access in developing countries. Using rich administrative data on loans to coffee farmers from a large Colombian bank, I show that negative weather shocks lead to lower loan repayment, lower credit scores and more...

Improving productivity among microenterprises is important, especially in low-income countries where market imperfections are pervasive, and resources are scarce. Relaxing credit constraints can increase the productivity of microenterprises. Using a field experiment involving agricultural...

We study repayment and delinquency in an innovative loan contract that offers borrowers a wide range of flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to study how borrowers repay within the framework of this loan. We identify eight clusters that can...