How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender’s ability to punish defaulters? We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining the impact of fingerprinting of borrowers, which improves the lender’s ability to withhold future loans from individuals who have previously defaulted while rewarding good borrowers with increased loan sizes. Study participants were smallholder fa...

Despite the rapid expansion of microfinance services in the past several decades, the low use of formal credit exhibited by poor households, the high dropout rates experienced by many microfinance institutions, and the prevalence of dual credit markets, even in the most saturated markets, suggest that microcredit may fail to meet the needs of many poor households. This paper examines the import...

We draw a distinction between the concepts of purchase affordability (whether a household is able to borrow enough funds to purchase a house) and repayment affordability (the burden imposed on a household of repaying the mortgage). We operationalize this distinction in the context of a new methodology for constructing affordability measures that draws on the value-at-risk concept and takes acco...

Technical debt is a metaphor that describes the long-term effects of shortcuts taken in software development activities to achieve near-term goals. In this study, we explore a new context of technical debt that relates to database normalization design decisions. We posit that ill-normalized databases can have longterm ramifications on data quality and maintainability costs over time, just like ...

2 The Merton model, which is used for modeling default probabilities, is based on the assumption that the equity value is an option on the asset of a company with the strike price equal to the company debts. In the Merton model, it is implicitly assumed that debts last for a fixed period of time, and determining the default point that is the strike price of the option has been controversial in ...