Uncollateralized lending to jointly liable groups of individuals has proven to be a successful way of delivering credit to the poor in less-developed countries. Currently, such financial arrangements are being tried in the United States. The author develops a financial intermediation model in...

This paper evaluates the short-term impact of Thailand's 'Million Baht Village Fund' program, among the largest scale government microfinance initiatives in the world, using pre-and post-program panel data and quasi-experimental cross-village variation in credit-per-household. We find that the...