Micro-entrepreneurs often lack the financial literacy required to make important financial decisions. We conducted a randomized evaluation with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct programs: standard accounting training versus a simplified, rule-of-thumb...

Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

We model an economy where it is beneficial for high-type organizations to collaborate with other high types, and where this assortative-matching pattern allows informed financiers to provide inexpensive funds to partner companies of their high-type ventures. The expected funding benefit...

In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...

Este trabajo analiza la estrategia fiscal óptima para Chile, determinando el gasto total y fiscal de la economía, así como de la carga tributaria considerando (i) el problema de distribución intergeneracional de los recursos asociados al cobre; (ii) que los ingresos del cobre son volátiles,...

Understanding the extent to which interventions in financial markets can reduce liquidity constraints is of crucial importance to researchers and policymakers. Even though there is consensus that limited access to financing can reduce the number of profitable projects undertaken by...

We empirically explore whether firms have a target for the number of banks from which they borrow, and whether having multiple bank relationships has an impact on firms’ liquidity situation. A bank merger in Chile provides a quasi-experiment as it constitutes an exogenous reduction in the...

We document the presence of multiple and varied constraints to small and medium firm growth. This presents both a practical problem for business training programs and a challenge to academic economists trying to identify mechanisms though which these programs may affect outcomes. External...