We document the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital finance and fintech adoption and usage. Drawing on mobile application data from 71 countries, we estimate that the spread of COVID-19 and related government lockdowns led to between a 33.1 and 36.6 percent increase in the relative rate...

Information asymmetries and enforcement problems often limit commercial lenders’ entry into low-income markets. Using credit registry data, we study the “failed” entry of commercial lenders into a low-income, low-documentation microfinance market, which led to an over-indebtedness crisis....

We document the existence of a premium in the green bond market based on the greenness of green bonds. Using BERT, a natural language processing method for textual analysis, we develop a novel measure for bonds’ greenness and document that a 10 percent increase in the bond’s greenness...

Transformative effects on microfinance client business growth are expected in financial inclusion's traditional theory of change, yet have largely been unrealized in most randomized controlled trial studies on microcredit. While instructive, the broader policy relevance of individual studies may...

Consumer financial health has become a prominent topic in developed economy contexts, but its relevancy and microdeterminants in emerging markets are not yet well understood. This paper operationalizes newly formulated conceptual frameworks of global consumer financial health and financial...