We use an experiment with commercial bank loan officers to test how performance based compensation affects risk-assessment and lending. High-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending decisions. This effect, however, is muted by deferred compensation and...

How do inexperienced consumers learn to use a new financial technology? This paper presents results from a field experiment that introduced payroll accounts in a population of largely unbanked factory workers in Bangladesh. In the experiment, workers in a treatment group received monthly wage...

This paper studies the impact of a large debt relief program, intended to attenuate investment constraints among highly-indebted households in rural India. It isolates the causal effect of bankruptcy-like debt relief settlements using a natural experiment arising from India's Debt Relief Program...

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. The analysis...

Weather is a key source of income risk for many firms and households, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial approach to study how an innovative risk management instrument for hedging rainfall risk affects production decisions among a sample of...

The authors use panel data on the number of new firm registrations in 92 countries to study how the magnitude of reforms affects new firm registrations. They find that small reforms, in general less than 40 percent reduction in costs, days, or procedures required for business registration, do...

The authors employ a novel dataset on almost 30,000 trade credit contracts to describe the broad characteristics of the parties that contract together; the key contractual terms, such as the discount for early payment; and the days by when payment is due. Whereas prior work has typically used...

The authors examine the association of financial literacy with retirement planning in Russia, a country with a relatively old and rapidly aging population, large regional disparities, and a rapidly emerging financial market. They find that only 36.3 percent of respondents in the sample...