This paper attempts to provide a critical appraisal of the debate on the effectiveness of microfinance as a universal poverty reduction tool. It argues that while microfinance has developed some innovative management and business strategies, its impact on poverty reduction remains in doubt. Microfinance, however, certainly plays an important role in providing safety-net and consumption smoothen...

Banking sector openness may directly increase growth by improving the quality of financial services and increasing funds available, or indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which may reduce the cost of financing, in turn, increase capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of the paper is to empirically reinvestigate these direct and indirect l...

The Mexican banking crisis of 1994]1995 has widely been interpreted as the victim of the balance-of-payments crisis, rather than its cause. After all, Mexican banks had been enjoying high capitalization ratios, deemed to be more than sufficient to deal with the increased risk of non-performing loans. This paper, however, suggests that to a large extent Mexican accounting practices } rather than...

The joint existence of a lender of last resort and of a stock market is usually considered the sign of a developed financial infrastructure. This paper analyzes whether a securities market may play a role similar to that of a lender of last resort by being of assistance to a bank, which faces possible liquidity shortages. We examine which of these two institutions best prevents a bank’s liquidi...

Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in entrepreneurial success? A random sample of customers of India’s largest women’s bank was offered two days of business counseling, and a random subsample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention significantly increased participants’ business activity, but only if they were trained with a friend. Those trained with a fr...

Credit spreads display occasional spikes and are more strongly countercyclical in times of elevated financial stress. Financial crises extreme cases this nonlinear behavior, featuring skyrocketing credit spreads, sharp losses bank equity, deep recessions. We develop estimate a macroeconomic model with banking sector which banks’ leverage constraints occasionally binding equity issuance is endog...

This paper evaluates the literature on international unconventional monetary policies (UMPs). Introducing market segmentation, limits-to-arbitrage, and time-consistent policy in standard models permits a theoretical role for UMP. Empirical studies provide compelling evidence that UMPs influenced asset prices tail risk desired manner. Calibrated modeling vector autoregressive (VAR) exercises imp...

The majority of the poor lack access to bank accounts and have to use costly informal savings mechanisms. Using a field experiment, I randomly gave access to simple bank accounts with no fees at local bank branches to a large sample of female household heads in Nepal. Results show that there is untapped demand for savings accounts and that the poor do save. Access to the savings accounts increa...

In this paper we estimate a time-series model of excess liquidity in the Egyptian banking sector. While financial liberalization and financial stability are found to have reduced excess liquidity, these effects have been offset by an increase in the number of violent political incidents arising from conflict between radical Islamic groups and the Egyptian state. The link between political event...