Perception of Vendors on Informal Lending Institutions

Informal Influence of Board Members on IDA Lending

This paper examines the ability of Board Members of the most important multilateral donor to developing countries, the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank, to influence IDA allocations toward their home countries. I show that a system of Bank staff ratings of individual countries' policies, which has become more important in IDA lending over time, has systematically re...

Informal Institutions and Property Rights

In recent years, the call for strong and clear property rights has grown in law and development circles. In the landmark book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, de Soto put forth the claim that “strong and clear” property rights, formalized rather than informal, are necessary for economic efficiency and for the protection of the poor, who occu...

Matching in Informal Financial Institutions.

This paper analyzes an informal financial institution that brings heterogeneous agents together in groups. We analyze decentralized matching into these groups, and the equilibrium composition of participants that consequently arises. We find that participants sort remarkably well across the competing groups, and that they re-sort immediately following an unexpected exogenous regulatory change. ...

Informal Institutions a “Weaknesses” of Hu Behavior

Formal and Informal Market Institutions : Embeddedness Revisited

Market exchange involves many cognitive and non-cognitive processes — e.g., search, inference, prediction, negotiation. Much attention has been devoted to these issues both in theory and in experimental economics. I focus on the enforcement of market transactions against opportunistic behavior. I first discuss the different mechanisms that can deter opportunistic breach of contract. Some of the...