Microfinance is a social innovation to alleviate poverty by providing small unsecured loans to local entrepreneurs and the poor. Many borrowers use the microfinance loans to seed their small entrepreneurial businesses. However, the high interest rates charged by the microfinance institutions...

Most empirical work examining the intertemporal mean-variance relationship in stock returns has tended to use relatively simple specifications of the mean and especially of the conditional variance. We augment the information set to include economic variables that other researchers have found to...