The Chicago Fed has had a longstanding interest in the work of community development financial institutions (CDFI) and the evolution of the development finance industry. In this edition of Profitwise News and Views, we provide overviews of two conferences that addressed ways the industry is...

We provide a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impact of microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small businesses. We find that the redistributive impact of microfinance is stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the impact on aggregate...

This paper investigates whether small firms have experienced worse tightening of credit conditions during the Great Recession than large firms. To structure the empirical analysis, the paper first develops a simple model of bank loan pricing that derives both the interest rates on loans actually...

Remarks by Eric S. Rosengren, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, at the Connecticuct Business & Industry Association and MetroHartford Alliance Economic Summit & Outlook, Hartford, Connecticut, January 6, 2012.

Which of the strategies for financing constraints in economic models is the most empirically plausible? This paper tests two commonly used models of financing constraints, costly state verification (Townsend, 1979) and moral hazard (Holmstrom and Tirole, 1997), using a comprehensive data set of...

Widespread losses in the housing and stock markets have taken their toll on many small business owners who have traditionally relied on personal assets for funding support.

The literature has documented a positive relationship between the use of credit scoring for small business loans and small business credit availability, broadly defined. However, this literature is hampered by the fact that all of the studies are based on a single 1998 survey of the very largest...