Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty. This study conceives vulnerability as expected poverty and illustrates a methodology to empirically assess household vulnerability using pseudo panel data derived from repeated cross sections augmented...

This paper examines the ways in which lower-income households obtain basic financial services in urban communities in Mexico and the United States. And it discusses the efforts that private sector and government organizations are making to lower the cost or improve the quality of those services....

The authors investigate whether resident enterprise managers have an informational advantage about the countries in which they work. They propose a method for extracting information available to resident managers but unknown to investors and forecasters. They rest their hypothesis of...

This paper reviews the experience in transacting payments through the commercial banking system, to beneficiaries in Colombia's"Familias en Accion"program. The story told will be useful to those trying to solve the operational problem of moving cash, cost-effectively to large numbers of...

Farmers in developing countries face a wide array of risks. Yet they often lack formal financial instruments to protect against risks. This paper examines the impact on consumption, investment, and welfare of the separate provision of three financial products: weather insurance, savings, and...

Whether the likelihood of a credit boom ending is dependent on its age or not, or whether the respective behavior is smooth or bumpy are important issues to which the economic literature has not given attention yet. This paper tries to fill that gap, exploring those issues with a proper duration...

This paper uses Ethiopian data to explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and its effects on farmers'resource allocation and crop productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled rural villages, largely because of...

Although the potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households to assess empirically the...

"The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,"by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) (henceforth RM) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and web postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998; henceforth PK) article"The Impact...

The standard macro(prudential) models focus on externalities and treat all prudential instruments as alternative, but equivalent, forms of Pigouvian taxes. This paper explicitly models individual banks'risk choices and shows that different prudential instruments affect banks'risk-taking...