Based on more recent research and evidence, including declassified information regarding the communist period in Romania, the study focuses on examining the 1980s foreign debt crisis context, its determinants and consequences, the impact of internal and external factors, intending to provide an...

This paper investigates how gender disparities affect the time to repay group micro-finance loans using survival analysis and hazard decomposition techniques. We also control for the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the time needed by micro-finance loan borrowers to repay. We use a large...

This paper documents a positive relation between bank competition and the penetration of bank accounts at the municipal level in Mexico. To account for potential biases in our regressions due to the endogeneity of market structure, we employ a two-stage estimation approach based on an...

We study the relationship between financial constraints and employment formalization by exploiting heterogeneity in the industry-level degree of financial dependence, in the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998). This dependence, and variation in aggregate credit, lets us measure industry-level...

We show that countries that take on more international risk are rewarded with higher expected consumption growth. International risk is defined as the beta of a country's consumption growth with world consumption growth. High-beta countries hold more foreign assets, as predicted by the theory....

Given the substantial amount of resources currently invested in microcredit programs, it is more important than ever to accurately assess the extent to which peer monitoring by borrowers faced with group liability contracts actually reduces moral hazard. We conduct a field experiment with women...

While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate...

This paper identifies two alternative forms of prudential regulation. The first set is formed by regulations that directly control financial aggregates, such as liquidity expansion and credit growth. An example is capital requirements as currently incorporated in internationally accepted...

The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioral frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption,...

It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on remittances, payments, and development. We describe many of the research questions that now dominate the literature and why they lead us to uninformative answers. We propose reasons why these questions dominate, the most important of...