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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Credit Elasticities In Less-Developed Economies: Implications For Microfinance, Dean S. Karlan, Jonathan Zinman
Credit Elasticities In Less-Developed Economies: Implications For Microfinance, Dean S. Karlan, Jonathan Zinman
Dartmouth Scholarship
Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainability) without reducing the poor's access to credit. We test the assumption of price inelastic demand using randomized trials conducted by a consumer lender in South Africa. The demand curves are downward sloping, and steeper for price increases relative to the lender's standard rates. We also find that loan size is far more responsive to changes in loan maturity than to changes in interest rates, which is consistent with …
Planning And Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell
Planning And Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell
Dartmouth Scholarship
Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. It shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole. In addition, women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan …