Despite the professed claims of microcredit alleviating poverty, little is known about what kind of credit contract is … belief, we also found that the microcredit demand by the ultra-poor is not necessarily small, and in particular the ultra …-poor are significantly more likely to join a microcredit program than the moderately poor if a grace period with longer …

This survey article provides a brief but comprehensive overview of microfinance academic literature with emphasis on … recent innovations, trends and efficiency. In particular, we focus on controversial issues of microfinance, such as … of the reviewed literature underline the great improvement in the microfinance field that, however, has not reached its …

We investigate the puzzle of microfinance: that loans generate large measured returns for businesses, yet loan take …-up is low and the businesses often close. We analyze a randomized trial that bundled microfinance loans with a cheap health … business losses, rather than pay modest insurance premiums, implies the substantial financial gains from microfinance loans are …

We apply a panel of 331 microfinance institutions from 37 countries to investigate the relationship between social … beliefs and microfinance financial performance. We find that microfinance institutions in countries with higher levels of … trust and more collectivist culture have lower operating and default costs and charge lower interest rates. These results …

We study a unique microcredit model with zero interest rate and voluntary contributions, used by Akhuwat, a … microfinance organization operating in Pakistan since 2001. Borrowers are encouraged to give any amount they wish to the …

Trust is important for development but can be hard to build. In this paper, we report on experiments designed to … understand the determinants of trust in villages in eastern Uganda, and in particular whether trust can be `built´ by offering … insurance to people as a protection against the possibility that the trust they offer will not be reciprocated. We find, firstly …