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...

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...

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....

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,...

The roles of banks and securities markets evolve during the process of economic development. As countries develop economically, (1) the size of both banks and securities markets increases relative to the size of the economy, (2) the association between an increase in economic output and an...

In the past two decades, in a series of banking crises around the world, banks have become systematically insolvent. These crises have occurred in developed and developing economies alike. To make such financial system breakdowns less likely and to limit their costs if they occur, policymakers...

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...

In recent years, the number of surveys on access to and use of financial services has multiplied, but little is known about whether the data generated are comparable across countries or within the same country over time. A randomized experiment in Ghana tested whether the identity of the...

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...