A large literature showed that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries; these may be mitigated by collateral or relationship lending, possibilities often precluded to small business. We investigate the effect on small business finance...

The importance of institutional settings for economic development outcomes is broadly acknowledged nowadays. This paper investigates the role of official statistics in alleviating financing constraints in emerging and developing economies, with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Official...

This paper shows how growth in financially open developing countries is affected when relations with international lenders suffer from the danger of moral hazard. We find that if entrepreneurs can gamble with foreign creditors¡¯ money, borrowing under standard debt contracts is constrained by...

We examine the role played by Mutual Guarantee Institutions (MGIs) in the lending policies undertaken by banks at the peak of the Great Crisis of 2007–2009. We address this issue by using a large database on Italian firms built from the credit files of UniCredit banking Group and focusing on...

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval....

A large body of literature has shown that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries. Banks can overcome these asymmetries through relationship lending, or at least mitigate their effects by asking for collateral. Small firms, especially...

A large body of literature has shown that small firms experience difficulties in accessing the credit market due to informational asymmetries. Banks can overcome these asymmetries through relationship lending, or at least mitigate their effects by asking for collateral. Small firms, especially...

We test if riskier borrowers are willing to pay higher interest rates than safer borrowers are as predicted by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981). The data are from an Indian financial institution where interest rates are determined by competitive bidding. The government imposed an interest rate ceiling...

Most of the literature attributes credit constraints in small-farm developing-country agriculture to the variability of returns to investment in this sector. But the literature does not fully explain lenders’ reluctance to finance investments in technologies that provide both higher average...

In a two period overlapping generations economy with asymmetric information, we investigate the interaction between credit market development and human capital accumulation. As is typical, young borrowers supply their endowed unit of labor time to earn wage income which is used as internal...