We explore the relationship between property crime and growth among microenterprises in Mexico. We use data on microenterprises and crime incidence from victimization surveys. We find that higher rates of property crime are associated with a significantly lower probability an enterprise plans to...

Corruption and crime are factors that regularly affect firms, yet few papers compare the two impacts. This is largely due to a lack of data, something I overcome using recent surveys of microenterprises in Mexico. After instrumenting for individual firm-level incidence, I find that thieves are...

One potential explanation for low formal credit use is that poor entrepreneurs generate returns to capital below borrowing costs and cannot afford the loans. I test this using a new, nationally representative data from Ecuador, focusing on entrepreneurs that say credit constraints are a major...

Despite the many benefits of bank use, large portions of the U.S. population remain unbanked. One of the largest is immigrants, where the incidence of being unbanked is over 13% higher than among natives in 2001. We document growth in the nativity gap in bank use over time. We also test the...

Despite dramatic microfinance growth, formal credit use by poor households remains low. There is increasing evidence of muted demand, suggesting a link between the risk of projects financed by credit and households' risk management. This article analyses these links using panel data on urban...

In this article, the authors outline a classroom exercise involving goldsmiths designed to improve undergraduate students' understanding of how banks create money. This concept is important to macroeconomics and money and banking courses, yet students frequently struggle with it, largely due to...