Traditional banks have proved to have severe limits in mitigating financial exclusion. The microfinance revolution is intended to address this problem by devising new approaches which ease credit access for poor and uncollateralized borrowers. In this introductory essay we present a special...

In many countries, Mutual Loan-Guarantee Societies (MLGSs) are assuming ever-increasing importance for small business lending. In this paper we provide a theory to rationalise the raison d'etre of MLGSs. The basic intuition is that the foundation for MLGSs lies in the inefficiencies created by...

For many countries, remittance behaviour by migrants is an important component of their overall international financial flows. The empirical literature has, so far, analysed the propensity to remit as a function of migrants' socio-economic characteristics. However, no studies have fully...

In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and...

Does participation in inter-firm networks make access to credit easier for firms? Is finance a motivation driving the formation of inter-firm networks? During the last twenty years these two questions have been hotly debated by economists both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we...

A puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank-independent firms. In this paper, we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firms' growth, distinguishing firms by size and “health”. The idea...

Developing countries are the least to blame for the outbreak of the financial crisis, but they are destined to suffer the most dramatic and long-lasting consequences. This chapter focuses on the early responses of the International Monetary Fund to the present crisis in low- and middle-income...

In the wake of the global crisis the International Monetary Fund (IMF) increased its exposure to low-and middle-income countries and boosted the overhaul of its lending approach to enhance its role in preventing crises. This paper tests whether IMF lending has targeted countries most affected by...