In this article the authors use quantile regressions to assess the relationship between economic and financial development at each percentile of the distribution of economic development. Thus, the quantile regressions provide information on how the associations between economic development and...

To analyze the prospects for expanding financial access to the poor, bank professionals assessed 1,438 households in six provinces in Indonesia to judge their creditworthiness. About 40 percent of poor households were judged creditworthy according to the criteria of Indonesia's largest...

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper calculates the costs of microcredit and other elements of the microcredit business model using proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions...

Take-up of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India decreases with basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations, increases with household wealth, and decreases with binding credit constraints. These results are consistent with the...

Female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly due to constraints on women's time and mobility, often reinforced by social norms. We analyze a marketing experiment designed to encourage female uptake of a new microcredit product. A brochure with two different covers was...

A new database of World Bank loans to support financial sector development is used to investigate whether countries that received such loans experienced more rapid growth on standard indicators of financial development than countries that did not. Self-selection is accounted for with...

Evidence based on firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure suggests that in low-income countries, labor growth is more rapid in countries with a higher level of private credit/GDP. This positive relationship with private credit is especially...

What role does the business environment play in promoting or restraining firm growth? Recent literature points to a number of factors as obstacles to growth. Inefficient functioning of financial markets, inadequate security and enforcement of property rights, poor provision of infrastructure,...

Information from 209 banks in 62 countries is used to develop new indicators of barriers to banking services around the world, show their correlation with measures of outreach, and explore their association with bank and country characteristics suggested by theory as potential determinants....

Recent data compilations show that many poor and nonpoor people in many developing countries face a high degree of financial exclusion and high barriers in access to finance. Theory and empirical evidence point to the critical role that improved access to finance has in promoting growth and...