This paper examines whether recently introduced village fundsʺ, one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the...

This paper proposes an estimator for the endogenous switching regression models with fixed effects. The estimator allows for endogenous selection and for conditional heteroscedasticity in the outcome equation. Applying the estimator to a dataset on the productivity in agriculture substantially...

The report assesses the performance of financial markets in rural areas of Romania, based on three - rural household, rural enterprise, and financial intermediary - surveys, carried out in 1998, and other official data covering 1997. The study finds that rural financial markets perform rather...