The ability of consumers to make informed financial decisions improves their ability to develop sound personal finance. This paper uses a panel dataset from Russia, an economy in which consumer loans grew at an astounding rate - from about US$10 billion in 2003 to over US$170 billion in 2008 -...

How do inexperienced consumers learn to use a new financial technology? We present 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 payments...

We 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 information...

"Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have...

We find that in 1989-1996, when U.S. monetary policy tightly targeted overnight fed funds rates, the volatility and persistence of spreads between target and term fed funds levels were larger for longer-maturity loans. We show that such patterns are consistent with an expectational model where...

Using a comprehensive database of firms in Western and Eastern Europe, we study how the business environment in a country drives the creation of new firms. Our focus is on regulations governing entry. We find entry regulations hamper entry, especially in industries that naturally should have...

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...

Explicit deposit insurance has been spreading rapidly in recent years, even to countries with low levels of financial and institutional development. Economic theory indicates that deposit-insurance design features interact--for good or ill--with country-specific elements of the financial and...

This paper measures and analyzes two types of hidden capital at Japanese banks: (1) the net undervaluation present in accounting measures of on-balance-sheet assets and liabilities and (2) the net economic value of off-balance-sheet items. A model is constructed that explains changes in both...

This paper critically reviews the literature on finance and inequality, highlighting substantive gaps in the literature. Finance plays a crucial role in most theories of persistent inequality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, economic theory provides a rich set of predictions concerning both the...