Lending to the Unbanked: Relational Contracting with Loan Sharks
Kevin Lang,
Kaiwen Leong (),
Huailu Li and
Haibo Xu ()
Additional contact information
Kaiwen Leong: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Haibo Xu: Tongji University
No 13360, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
We study roughly 11,000 loans from unlicensed moneylenders to over 1,000 borrowers in Singapore and provide basic information about this understudied market. Borrowers frequently expect to repay late. While lenders do rely on additional punishments to enforce loans, the primary cost of not repaying on time is compounding of a very high interest rate. We develop a very simple model of the relational contract between loan sharks and borrowers and use it to predict the effect of a crackdown on illegal moneylending. Consistent with our model, the crackdown raised the interest rate and lowered the size of loans.
Keywords: illegal lending; enforcement; relational contract (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K42 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-iue, nep-law, nep-ore and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13360.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Lending to the Unbanked: Relational Contracting with Loan Sharks (2020) 
Working Paper: Lending to the Unbanked: Relational Contracting with Loan Sharks (2019) 
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:iza:izadps:dp13360
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().