Publications

Publications

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  • October 2014 (Revised December 2014)
  • Case

Gentera: Beyond Microcredit

By: Rajiv Lal and Lisa Mazzanti
Gentera, whose largest subsidiary is Compartamos Banco, has been a fantastically successful endeavor since it started in the 1990s. But in 2014, Gentera faces challenges in expanding beyond group-lending and micro-credit into microfinance and beyond in order to fulfill... View Details
Keywords: Financial Inclusion; Compartamos; Gentera; Micro-lending; Microfinance; Insurance; Banking Industry; Insurance Industry; Mexico City
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  • November 2022 (Revised October 2024)
  • Case

'A Marshall Plan for Africa': James Mwangi and Equity Group Holdings

By: Caroline M. Elkins, Debora L. Spar, Zeke Gillman and Julia M. Comeau
Financial Inclusion. Dignity. Trust. These were the core principles driving James Mwangi’s transformation of Equity Building Society, insolvent in 1991, into what is, today, Equity Group Holdings, East and Central Africa’s largest retail banking institution. Raised in... View Details
Keywords: Income Inequality; Micro Finance; Microcredit; Microfinance; Banks and Banking; Equality and Inequality; Mission and Purpose; Business Model; Social Entrepreneurship; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Africa; Kenya
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  • October 2014
  • Case

CreditEase: Providing Credit and Financial Services for China's Underclass

By: Lena G. Goldberg, Paul Healy and Nancy Hua Dai
In 2013 Ning Tang, who in 2006 founded CreditEase as a broker of P2P loans to unbanked individuals and small businesses in China, confronts the challenges of rapid growth and expansion in a changing regulatory environment. CreditEase needs to develop technology to... View Details
Keywords: P2P Lending; HNW Products And Services; Business Growth; Business Start-ups; Government Regulation; Change Management; Credit; Microcredit; Banking; Innovation And Management; Developing Countries And Economies; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Law; Financing and Loans; Change; China
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  • 2024
  • Working Paper

Intrinsic Motivation and Referrals Within Firms: Evidence from a Large Microfinance Institution

By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth
Many organizations rely on internal referrals between employees with differing comparative advantages. Yet when an employee encounters a lucrative opportunity, they may be motivated to retain it even when doing so harms efficiency. We develop a framework that... View Details
Keywords: Loan Officers; Strategic Behavior; Strategic Disclosure; Microfinance; Financial Institutions; Financing and Loans
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  • March 2022
  • Article

Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps

By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We... View Details
Keywords: Microfinance; Entrepreneurship; Developing Countries and Economies; Financing and Loans
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  • 2016
  • Working Paper

Saving More in Groups: Field Experimental Evidence from Chile

By: Felipe Kast, Stephan Meier and Dina Pomeranz
We test the impact of a peer group savings program on precautionary savings through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microcredit clients. The first experiment finds that the Peer Group Treatment, which combines public goal setting, monitoring in the group,... View Details
Keywords: Saving; Decision Making; Interest Rates; Planning; Performance Effectiveness; Economics; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development; Social Enterprise; Global Range; Chile
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  • Research Summary

Individual Credit Constraints in Rural India (w/ Sendhil Mullainathan)

Credit access for the poor has recently been given center stage in the international policy arena. A plethora of reports and case studies have emphasized the enormous returns that micro-businesses face: the Year of Microcredit website notes that studies conducted in... View Details
  • 18 Sep 2007
  • First Look

First Look: September 18, 2007

  Working PapersOptimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt Authors:Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk Abstract Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's... View Details
Keywords: Martha Lagace
  • 15 Oct 2007
  • Research & Ideas

Businesses Beware: The World Is Not Flat

about $1 billion on job-retraining, according to The Economist.) The creation of a 2-track world. As microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus put it in his speech accepting the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, if globalization "is a free-for-all... View Details
Keywords: by Martha Lagace
  • 01 Mar 2007
  • News

The Plight of the Global Poor

Indeed, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the microcredit Grameen Bank he founded in Bangladesh more than two decades ago. With interest rates ranging from zero to 20 percent, Grameen’s average loan (no... View Details
Keywords: Garry Emmons; bottom of the pyramid (BOP); Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Social Assistance; Health, Social Assistance
  • 04 Apr 2007
  • Research & Ideas

The Business of Global Poverty

weapon. Introduced about thirty years ago, this system of very small loans to grassroots entrepreneurs such as street vendors, subsistence farmers, or home-based businesses has enjoyed widespread success. Indeed, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus... View Details
Keywords: by Garry Emmons
  • 31 May 2016
  • First Look

May 31, 2016

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=50189 Saving More in Groups: Field Experimental Evidence from Chile By: Kast, Felipe, Stephan Meier, and Dina Pomeranz Abstract—We test the impact of a peer group savings program on precautionary savings through two... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 18 Feb 2015
  • First Look

First Look: February 18

that arise from taking a single approach and leverage the strengths of both approaches. Publisher's link: http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1016/j.riob.2014.10.002   Cases & Course Materials Harvard Business School Case 515-017 Gentera: Beyond View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne