We investigate the effects of a large government-initiated debt relief program on ex-ante and ex post credit market efficiency. We use loan accounts data for a large sample of borrowers before and after a nation-wide debt relief program in India. Employing robust regression discontinuity design,...

We ask whether machine learning algorithms improve the efficiency of screening of the loan officers, and thereby help expand access to formal credit. We obtain loan application level data from an Indian bank. To overcome the selective labels problem, we exploit the incentive driven within...

We investigate the impact of a large scale debt waiver program for small agricultural borrowers in India on the short term and long term consumption levels of the beneficiaries. We obtain consumption data from three national level surveys conducted before and after the waiver by a federal...

We examine the impact of transaction failures on the working of a biometric-enabled payment system introduced in India to facilitate banking by the poor. On average, nearly one-third of transactions fail. However, the proportion of failures decline steeply with user experience. The usage of the...