Access to microfinance entails a risk of over-indebtedness. A naïve present-biased micro-borrower may roll over debt after failure of an investment project financed with an MFI loan, even though she planned not to do so and would not have taken the MFI loan if she had been aware of the time...

Microborrowers may take usurious loans to repay a loan taken from a micronance institution because of having neglected the time inconsistency of optimal plans or having discounted future payoffs too strongly from the ex-post perspective. Microfinance programs should strive at preventing such...

Besley and Coate (1995) analyse the impact of joint liability and social sanctions on repayment rates when repayment enforcement is imperfect. Motivated by the microfinance industry’s move towards markets, we conduct an equilibrium analysis of the Besley–Coate model. We find that...

We develop a growth model with endogenous technological progress in which the financial sector plays an explicit role. Thereby we discuss the role of different financial regimes in the growth process. We contrast a bank-dominated financial system with a market-dominated system. In the first one...

This paper analyzes a model in which housing tenure choice serves as a means of screening households with different utilization rates. If the proportion of low-utilization types is small, there is a separating equilibrium at which tenure choice acts as a screening device: consistent with...

This paper analyzes a model in which housing tenure choice serves as a means of screening households with different utilization rates. If the proportion of low-utilization types is small, there is a separating equilibrium at which tenure choice acts as a screening device: consistent with...