Given the substantial amount of resources currently invested in microcredit programs, it is more important than ever to accurately assess the extent to which peer monitoring by borrowers faced with group liability contracts actually reduces moral hazard. We conduct a field experiment with women about to enter a group loan program in Paraguay and then gather administrative data on their repaymen...

This paper examines the impact of a public credit registry on the repayment behavior of borrowers. We implement an experimental credit market in which loan repayment is not third-party enforceable. We compare market outcome with a credit registry to that without a credit registry. This experiment is conducted for two market environments: first a market in which interactions between borrowers an...

This paper proposes a model in which house prices are determined by housing affordability in the short run, while being determined by acquisition costs in the long run. Housing affordability is, in turn, determined by nominal income and nominal mortgage payments. The model explains the recent housing market run-up by lower housing repayment, decreasing nominal interest rates, and a large inflow...

Moderate Density Parity Check (MDPC) codes are defined here as codes which have a parity-check matrix whose row weight is O( √ n) where n is the length n of the code. They can be decoded like LDPC codes but they decode much less errors than LDPC codes: the number of errors they can decode in this case is of order Ω( √ n). Despite this fact they have been proved very useful in cryptography for d...

accurate calculation of reliability index is very important for the reliability analysis of structures. in some limit state functions with nonlinear characteristic and several local optimum design points, the computational reliability methods may not appropriately determine the failure probability, and iterative reliability approaches may be converged to local optimum design points. in this pap...