Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this article we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system...

Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Price deflators are also often missing or disputed. In response, poverty prediction methods that track...

Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data...

Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this article we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system...

As a result of sustained housing market fragility, a growing number of borrowers are walking away from their underwater homes even though they have the ability to pay. Despite recent advances, questions remain about what influences this decision. In this paper, we use survey data to examine the...

How does the large market for credit score improvement products affect consumers and market efficiency? For consumers, we use a randomized encouragement design on a standard credit builder loan (CBL) and find null average effects on scores. But a generalized random forest algorithm finds...

Prize-linked programs are becoming increasingly popular, yet little evidence exists regarding their efficacy. I conduct the first field experiment examining whether prize-linked incentives can be effective in promoting debt reduction by randomizing access among 6,907 borrowers in a debt...

Trust plays an important role in financial decision-making, particularly regarding financial advice. In fact, investors cite “trust” as the most important determinant in seeking a financial service professional for advice (Hung et al., 2010). In this paper, we explore the relationships...