This paper uses the framework of an OLG economy for an analysis of the dynamic interaction between the precision of information about individual skills, investment in education, human capital accumulation and social welfare. The human capital of an individual depends on both his (subjectively) random ability and his investment in education. Individual investment in education is financed through...

This paper presents a study of the operations and accounting practices within the Fijian Development Bank. These practices cannot be understood outside the complex tensions and contradictions in Fijian society. Such tensions and antagonisms are a legacy of what has been called in other places 'post-colonial stress syndrome'. The Bank is faced with the (impossible) task of reconciling a history ...

1Nebraska Division of Public Health, Lincoln, Nebraska 2North Carolina Foundation for Advanced Health Programs, Cary, North Carolina 3Department of Family & Community Medicine, University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences, Grand Forks, North Dakota 4New Mexico Health Resources, Albuquerque, New Mexico 5 Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North C...

Financial stress is widely believed to cause health problems. However, policies seeking to relieve financial stress by limiting debt levels of poor households may directly worsen their economic well-being. We evaluate an alternative policy - increasing the repayment flexibility of debt contracts. A field experiment randomly assigned microfinance clients to a monthly or a traditional weekly inst...

This paper uses data from Uganda’s largest incumbent microfinance institution to analyze the impact of entry by competing lenders on client behavior. We examine the geographic placement decisions of competitors, and find that lenders of different types cluster spatially and have pushed into rural areas in recent years. We observe that increased competition induces a decline in repayment perform...

We propose a new model for policy analysis of banking crises (or systemic bank runs) based on the monetary framework developed by Lagos and Wright (2005). If banks cannot enforce loan repayment and have to secure loans by collateral, a banking crisis due to coordination failure among depositors can occur in response to a sunspot shock, and the banks become insolvent as a result of the bank runs...

Technological innovations in the mortgage industry have had profound impacts on every step in the homeownership process. Much of the literature has focused on the front end of the process, particularly the impacts of automated underwriting systems. Literature on loan servicing has focused on the borrower option to default with little attention paid to degrees of default or loss mitigation effor...

Providing financial service to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia presents a challenge for small rural banks such as People’ Credit Banks. These banks are required to infer risks about customers’ loan repayment from structured (quantitative, financial) and unstructured (qualitative, non-financial) type of credit information. In this study, the complex nature of credit rela...