This paper examines the role of collateral in the rural credit market of an emerging country. Due to opaque information and weak enforcement, the need for collateral is expected to be high. However, rural households usually lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved?...

This paper examines whether recently introduced village funds", one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the...

This paper examines the contribution of recently introduced village funds in rural Thailand, one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented. We use a cross-sectional approach examining village funds in relation to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that village funds...

Due to opaque information and weak enforcement in emerging loan markets, the need for collateral is high, whereas borrowers lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved? We find for a representative sample from Northeast Thailand that indeed most loans do not include...

We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing....

This paper examines the nature of risk faced by households in Thailand and the strategies that these households adopt to mitigate the adverse effect from income shortfalls. I use a new cross-section dataset that is based on a sample of both urban and rural households. I find that price shock is...

We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing....

Die vergangenen Jahre haben die Kehrseite des deutschen Exportmodells verdeutlicht, die Abhängigkeit Deutschlands von seinen Handelspartnern. Besonders schmerzhaft ist dies gegenwärtig gegenüber Russland und potenziell gegenüber China. Insofern scheint es naheliegend, den deutschen...

We present evidence from a repeated survey on risky asset holdings carried out on a representative sample of the German population six times between April and June 2020. Given the size of the Covid‐19 shock, we find little evidence of portfolio rebalancing in April 2020. In May, however,...

The consumer debt of households in Germany totals in the triple-digit billions and is characterized by a wide range of interest rates. Despite the high volume of debt, many people do not know the terms of their consumer credit contracts. This report analyzes new survey data on general knowledge...