IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/30634.html

Give Me a Pass: Flexible Credit for Entrepreneurs in Colombia

Author

Listed:
  • Lasse Brune
  • Xavier Giné
  • Dean Karlan

Abstract

Although microcredit has reached millions, recent randomized evaluations find limited average business impacts. Contract rigidity, specifically the fixed and frequent installments, may restrict moral hazard but limit productive risk-taking, thus limiting the impact. With a Colombian lender, we experimentally compared, for a sample of new borrowers, a standard rigid loan to a more flexible loan that included three “passes” with which borrowers could delay repayments. The flexible loan led to some shifts in investment behavior but had no average impact on revenue, profit level, or profit variance, and led to higher default.

Suggested Citation

  • Lasse Brune & Xavier Giné & Dean Karlan, 2022. "Give Me a Pass: Flexible Credit for Entrepreneurs in Colombia," NBER Working Papers 30634, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30634
    Note: CF DEV LE PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w30634.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giorgia Barboni, 2024. "Innovations in the repayment structure of microcredit contracts," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 40(1), pages 129-138.
    2. Tefera, Girum Abebe & Cassidy, Rachel & Weis, Toni Johannes, 2025. "Access to Capital and Women's Entrepreneurship," Policy Research Working Paper Series 11232, The World Bank.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • O21 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Development Planning and Policy - - - Planning Models; Planning Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30634. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.