An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, much of the blame has been assigned to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-run relationship between political...

Can scoring models help microfinance lenders in poor countries as much as they have helped credit-card lenders in rich countries? I model the probability that loans from a microlender in Bolivia had arrears of 15 days or more. Although arrears in microfinance depend on many factors difficult to...

Viet Nam was a country ruled by colonists, divided, or at war for most of the 20th century. Unification of the country in 1976 was followed by the invasion of Cambodia in 1978, and a subsequent brief but violent war with the People’s Republic of China. This legacy had profound consequences for...

This paper presents a scoring model that predicts the risk of drop-out for borrowers at a microfinance lender in Bolivia. Drop-out risk was greater for women, manufacturers, newer borrowers, and those with more arrears. Out-of-sample tests suggest that scoring may help microfinance lenders to...

Microenterprise programs attempt to help poor people start or strengthen small businesses. Funding and political support has grown rapidly. Is microenterprise a good use of scarce development funds? Unfortunately, most evaluations have been case studies in what not to do. Because benefits and...

Wide agreement about the goal of microfinance--to improve the welfare of the poor--has not led to wide agreement about how best to achieve that goal. To aid discussion, I propose a framework for outreach--the social benefits of microfinance--in terms of six aspects: worth, cost, depth, breadth,...

Attempts to gauge the depth of outreach of microfinance organizations usually start--and often end--with the measurement of loan size. But just what is loan size? Loan size has at least seven aspects, each of which matters not only for depth of outreach but also for profitability. The aspects...

Meta-rules, or rules for making rules, determine the costs of innovation and thus the pace of economic growth. Adapting rules to a changing economic environment through explicit, well-designed meta-rules makes economic growth quicker, less painful, and more certain than adapting rules through...

This report provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the financial results of five organizations which are clients of FondoMicro. It also includes a qualitative assessment of the long-run vision held by these institutions' managers and of the organizations' ability to allow a...

Examines the productivity performance of the wholesale and retail trade sectors in light of their significant contribution to Australia’s record productivity performance in the 1990s. Fundamental changes in the nature and operations of wholesale trade, in particular, have brought marked...