We implement a lab-in-the-field experiment with 334 Turkish loan officers to document gender discrimination in small business lending and unpack mechanisms. Officers review multiple real-life applications which we randomize applicant gender. While unconditional approval rates are the same, 26 percent more likely require guarantor when present same application as coming from female instead of ma...

Understanding how capital flows within rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa can provide important insights on the nature of poverty and the effectiveness of financial intermediation interventions. In this paper, we use unique individual level savings and borrowing data to study the flow of funds within a sample of 104 Ugandan savings groups. We show that poor households borrow from wealthier...

We study how foreign bank penetration affects financial sector development in poor countries. A theoretical model shows that when domestic banks are better than foreign banks at monitoring soft information customers, foreign bank entry may hurt these customers and worsen welfare. The model also predicts that credit to the private sector should be lower in countries with more foreign bank penetr...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government borrowing. In a lemons credit market low credit risk firms switched from bank to nonbank finance, including ...

Using a database from post-communist, pre-deposit-insurance Russia, we demonstrate the presence of quantity-based sanctioning of weaker banks by both firms and households, particularly after the financial crisis of 1998. Evidence for the standard form of price discipline, however, is notably weak. Estimating the deposit supply function, we show that, particularly for poorly capitalized banks, i...

In standardWalrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities such as fire sales lead to overinvestment in illiquid assets or underprovision of liquidity. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far from guaranteed. In a standard model of liquidity shocks, when liquidity is sufficiently scarce, Cour...

This study by adopting rolling regression techniques investigate whether bank and life insurance equity returns sensitivity to long term unanticipated interest rate changes has been changed since the Bank of England was granted operational independence in May 1997. Our results indicate that there may well have been changes in the way banks and life insurance companies manage interest rate risk....