The study examines the effects of gender and credit constraints on rural students' advancement to secondary education, which is arguably the major bottleneck in Thailand's education system. Credit constraints are measured indirectly through rainfall variation, availability of informal lenders in...

This study uses the example of the German cooperatives to test one hypothesis often advanced by advocates of microcredit institutions: that cooperatives succeeded because they overcame problems caused by asymmetric information and enforcement problems in credit markets.