Informal Credit in Village Economies: Contract Duration with Personal and Community Enforcement

Loren Brandt () and Arthur Hosios

Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper provides an explanation for several important features of informal credit contracts negotiated in economies where households lack collateral, and ready access to legal authorities and formal financial institutions is absent. Our analysis highlights the choice between loans with well-defined repayment periods (fixed durations) and those that are open-ended (no duration). We argue that households negotiate fixed- duration loans only when the borrower's ability to repay is private information, and borrowers enjoy non-credit (social) exchanges with lenders that can be withdrawn to encourage loan repayment. Other differences in loan terms can be explained by the exclusive availability of collective loan enforcement to lenders and borrowers residing in the same community. Drawing on a unique household-level survey, we find empirical support for our model's explanation for duration and the size of loans, as well as borrower's repayment behavior. Our analysis also highlights a negative externality among informal personal and community enforcement mechanisms whereby the availability of both mechanisms in the same village reduces the payments that can be credibly promised with either one.

JEL-codes: K (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2004-10-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-mfd
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 60
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/le/papers/0410/0410001.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wpa:wuwple:0410001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Law and Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).