Social Networks, Neighborhood Effects, and Credit Access: Evidence from Rural Guatemala

Bruce Wydick, Harmony Karp Hayes and Sarah Hilliker Kempf

World Development, 2011, vol. 39, issue 6, 974-982

Abstract: Summary We measure the extent to which social networks determine sources of credit from a survey of 465 households in western Guatemala. We estimate correlated, contextual, and endogenous effects of networks at the neighborhood, church, and village levels, finding that church networks display endogenous effects in credit access. We calculate an elasticity of social imitation (ESI) indicating if the percentage of people accessing microfinance in a church network doubles, the probability of an individual household accessing microfinance increases by 14.1%, a magnitude similar to our estimated ESIs for televisions and cell phones within church and neighbor networks.

Keywords: microfinance; credit; markets; peer; effects; social; networks; Guatemala; Latin; America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X11000507
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:39:y:2011:i:6:p:974-982

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().