The opinions and recommendations of the authors of this study do not necessarily reflect official positions of the SBA or other agencies of the U.S. government. Executive Summary The long expansion, two recessions, and financial disruptions affected businesses of all sizes over the past dozen years. Small businesses may be particularly exposed to recessions, banking conditions, and monetary pol...

This paper studies the effects of interest rate restrictions on loan allocation. In 1714, the British government tightened the usury laws, reducing the maximum permissible interest rate from 6 to 5 percent. A sample of individual loan transactions from a goldsmith bank allows us to examine how interest rate restrictions affected loan allocation. Average loan size and minimum loan size increased...

BACKGROUND Borrowing money is a common strategy to cope with health care costs. The impact of borrowing on households can be severe, leading to indebtedness and further impoverishment. However, the available literature on borrowing practices for health is limited. We explore borrowing practices for paying for health care by the poor in Cambodia and provide a typology, associated conditions, and...

Entrepreneurship is widely believed to be a main source of economic growth. This paper’s objective is threefold: (1) to estimate the impact of entrepreneurship measured by the birth of businesses on urban employment and income growth; (2) to examine how entrepreneurship supported by government guaranteed loans compares with market entrepreneurship regarding its impact on urban growth; and (3) t...

one of the measures taken by the 1979 revolutionary government of iran was to denounce the mixed public-private ownership of the banking system of the pre-revolutionary era and implement a full scale banking nationalization and merging scheme. since then the banking system has been operating under close supervision and scrutiny of the government - exercising its power to impose a variety of res...