This study draws on 20 in-depth interviews with microfinance institutions, practitioners, analysts/policymakers, and academics, along with a review of literature to understand and assess the state of the microfinance industry in the United States in terms of its salient features, critical issues...

We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We show that past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of...

This paper reviews academic studies of bank capital regulation in an effort to evaluate the intellectual foundation for the imposition of the Basel I and Basel II systems of risk-based capital requirements. The theoretical literature yields general agreement about the immediate effects of...

Credit literacy depends, in part, on understanding credit report information and scores. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a study in 2004 to assess consumers’ knowledge of their credit report and credit score, and the dispute resolution process. This study uses the GAO...

This paper analyzes the interaction between the success of group lending institutions and the stock of social capital (modeled by the level of trust) in the community where the group lending programs are located. Agents play a finitely repeated "trust game" in parallel with a finitely repeated...

This paper uses data collected from a retrospective pre-test to investigate he impact that a financial education program has on participants’ financial behaviors. Specifically, we compare program impact across participants with varying levels of financial competency prior to the program and...

Pension systems in North Africa are facing a certain number of difficulties. We present in this paper the pension system’s characteristics and organization in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. This work identifies the specificities, as well as the common problems, of each country’s pension...

We examine the impact of the current financial crisis on long-term U.S. Treasury yields by testing the impact of a series of events from December 2007 to March 2009 on the spread between 10-year United States Dollar (USD) London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) swap and 10-year U.S. Treasury...

In this article, the author explains the current state-based insurance regulatory system. Proposed legislation that would expand the federal role in regulating the business of insurance is evaluated in terms of whether it could potentially improve the current state-based insurance regulatory system.

I study the liquidity of global stock exchanges and how it determines cross sectional returns on stock portfolios of the exchanges. I measure liquidity by turnover ratio computed as value of shares traded over the market capitalization. I obtain data from FIBV, an association of global stock...