How has the microcredit movement managed to push financial frontiers? Theory shows that if borrowers vary in unobservable risk, then group‐based, joint liability contracts price for risk more accurately than individual contracts, provided that borrowers match with others of similar project...

We argue that the minimum differentiation firm location equilibrium and the pure strategy pricing equilibrium in Di Cintio's [Di Cintio, M., 2007. A note on the Hotelling principle of minimum differentiation: Imitation and crowd. Research in Economics 61 (3), 122-129] "Note" need not exist under...

We examine the long-run effects of micro-credit on development in an occupational choice model similar to Banerjee and Newman (JPE, 1993). Micro-credit is modeled as a pure improvement in the credit market that opens up self-employment options to some agents who otherwise could only work for...

While financial development and corruption control have been studied extensively, their interaction has not. We develop a simple model in which low corruption and financial development both facilitate the undertaking of productive projects, but act as substitutes in doing so. The...

We study whether and how the success of microfinance institutions ("MFI"s) depends on the country-level context, in particular macroeconomic and macro-institutional features. Understanding these linkages can make MFI evaluation more accurate and, further, can help to locate microfinance in the...