In developing countries, microfinance has been the darling of the development community, and in developed countries, microfinance fits well with Third Ways ideas. What are the challenges and opportunities for the attempt to replicate microfinance in the United States? This paper attempts to...

In the next ten years, advocates of microfinance organizations (MFOs) will seek more than $20 billion to provide small loans to 100 million of the poorest families worldwide. In the United States, the newest federal budget proposes a 159-percent increase in the about $200 million spent per year...

In rich countries, lenders often rely on credit scoring--formulae to predict risk based on the performance of past loans with characteristics similar to current loans--to inform decisions. Can credit scoring do the same for microfinance lenders in poor countries? This paper argues that scoring...

Sparked by examples from the third world, hundreds of microenterprise programmes have been started in the first world. Will they be successful? This paper reviews the evidence and concludes that microenterprise development is more difficult in the first world. For example, the microenterprise...

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...

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...