One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyze the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behavior of a sample of banks, using a sample of banks that have not accessed these markets as a control group. We find...

We test the hypothesis whether gradual privatization with a soft credit constraint to enterprises with state ownership (ESOs) implies slow restructuring. The transition economics literature does not study restructuring and financial constraints to investment jointly. We provide such an analysis using a panel of Latvian firms in the years 1993-1997. We find that firms have been downsizing their ...

This paper presents a novel method of using Dynamic Soft Descriptor as a fraud prevention method for Merchant (as opposed to card Issuer) in a credit/debit card transaction under Card Not Present (CNP) environment, such as online transactions. A unique identifier is embedded into the transaction descriptor, which will instantly appear in the cardholder’s credit/debit card online statement. By c...

This paper reports the results of a survey of U.S. cultural institution (CI) professionals about whether CI should seek to control access to and use of digital cultural collections. It describes motivations that encourage institutions to control access to or use of collections and factors that discourage institutions from controlling access and use. The paper describes the results in terms of t...

We examine whether stringent formal sector borrowing requirements in developing countries restrict credit access and the potential of asset-collateralized loans. When a Kenyan dairy cooperative exogenously replaced high down payments with loans collateralized by the asset itself a large water tank loan take-up increased from 2.4% to 41.9%. In contrast, substituting joint liability requirements ...

This paper reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor of successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow and insure is essential to strengthen women’s role as producers and widen the economic opportunities available to them. For this purpose it is essential to understand how context-specific legal right...

A large and growing literature has demonstrated in recent years how deep and efficient financial markets help to foster economic growth, by promoting investment and productivity growth (e.g., Rajan and Zingales, 1998). Through their role in selecting and monitoring projects, diversifying risks, and allowing investment and production to be carried out in the most productive scale and time frame,...

Using firm level data from eight Sub-Saharan Africa countries we examine credit constraint differentials between male and female manufacturing entrepreneurs. Enterprises owned by female entrepreneurs are less likely to be credit constrained compared to their male counterparts. The magnitude of this credit constraint gap varies with constraint and ownership definitions but the direction of the g...

Increasing availability of high speed Internet and wireless access points has allowed home users to connect not only their computers but various other devices. Every device running different applications requires unique Quality of Service (QoS). It has been shown that delay sensitive applications such as VoIP, remote login and online game sessions suffer increased latency in the presence of thr...

The preference of farmers between commercial and co-operative banks for borrowing has been studied with the objectives finding (a) distribution institutional credit across various categories to assess coverage quantum credit, (b) socio-economic factors which affect behaviour towards banks. In study, based on 100 farmer borrowers, discriminant analysis carried out. study offered some suggestions...