Suchergebnisse

Due to deregulation and financial liberalization, Latin American countries have recently undertaken bank restructuring and consolidation processes. This paper investigates firm access to credit in the region, focusing on the role of the credit market structure. Through an empirical investigation based on the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we find that access to bank credit is very heterogeneous. On average, smaller and less productive firms are less likely to apply for credit and more likely to be financially constrained. Besides, a high degree of bank penetration and competition is significantly correlated with a lower probability that borrowers are financially constrained. Finally, foreign banks penetration has a negative effect on access to credit particularly in less developed and more concentrated markets, while it has a positive influence in more competitive and financially developed markets.

AbstractRecent years have seen an intense and critical debate about the impact of microcredit on entrepreneurial activities and poor households' welfare. This paper suggests that information asymmetries in the ex post loan arrangement between the microfinance institution and local borrowers could partially explain the limited impact of microcredit. The physical distance separating borrowers from the microfinance institution could be considered as a proxy of agency costs, increasing the costs of monitoring and easing moral hazard. The estimation of the effect of distance on the borrower's self‐assessed outcome of a microcredit project in Colombia confirms the presence of moral hazard in the microcredit market, with agency costs increasing with geographical distance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper surveys the recent literature on the links between public debt and economic growth in advanced economies. We find that theoretical models yield ambiguous results. Whether high levels of public debt have a negative effect on long-run growth is thus an empirical question. While many papers have found a negative correlation between debt and growth, our reading of the empirical literature is that there is no paper that can make a strong case for a causal relationship going from debt to economic growth. We also find that the presence of thresholds and, more in general, of a non-monotone relationship between debt and growth is not robust to small changes in data coverage and empirical techniques. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges involved in measuring and defining public debt and some suggestions for future research which, in our view, should emphasize cross-country heterogeneity.