While potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. We use a direct elicitation approach on a national sample of Rwandan rural households to empirically assess the extent and nature...

We estimate a structural econometric model for the credit market in Italy, using bank-level information and the responses of Italian banks to the euro-area Bank Lending Survey to identify demand and supply, focusing on the recent financial crisis. The main results are the following. First, while...

Collateral plays two roles. It may be used as an ex-ante commitment mechanism against agency risk or for hedging expected default risk. Using cross-country loan level data, we find that the commitment motive alone explains collateralization. Going from the lowest to highest quartile of ex-ante...

Small-scale farming remains the primary source of income for a majority of the population in developing countries. While most farmers primarily work on their own fields, off-farm labor is common among small-scale farmers. A growing literature suggests that off-farm labor is not the result of...

The effects of credit constraints on university participation are investigated in a setting where income contingent tuition loans are available to students. Students most likely to face credit constraints have the same or higher probability of attending university as all other students, given...

In this paper, we investigate whether foreign currency accounts help overcome credit constraints in developing countries. We analyze a novel bank-level data set from Nepal, where a steady inflow of remittances has contributed to foreign currency deposits on commercial bank balance sheets. In...

An emerging new literature brings unique ideas from corporate finance to the study of international trade and investment. Insights about differences in the development of financial institutions across countries, the role of financial constraints, and the use of internal capital markets are...

Whether public lending to firms effectively eases credit constraints has been widely studied for very small businesses. The evidence documented for larger firms refers to lending that is significantly subsidized and targeted to these businesses, so the estimated positive effects may reflect poor...

I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, intensively used in studies of intertemporal consumption behavior, produce biased estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding credit constraints are ignored. As a more constructive...

This paper uses the propensity matching score approach to assess the impact of the IMF's debt limits policy (DLP) on borrowing behavior in countries eligible to borrow from its concessional lending window. The paper finds that countries under the DLP borrow significantly higher amounts of...