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on Community banking and credit unions |
| By: | Juan Carlos Angulo (Department of Economics, Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mexico); Monia Gruber (Facultad de Ciencias Economicas y Empresariales, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain) |
| Abstract: | This study examines the relationship between criminality and financial inclusion across 128 countries using data from the Global Findex Database and the Global Organized Crime Index. We assess whether the presence of criminal actors and criminal markets influences individuals' likelihood of owning a financial account. The results indicate that higher levels of criminality are associated with a lower probability of account ownership. This relationship is driven primarily by the presence of criminal actors, particularly state-embedded actors and mafia-style groups, rather than criminal markets. Regional analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity, with the strongest negative effects observed in East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. The findings contribute to the literature on criminality, financial inclusion, and digital finance by highlighting how criminal governance structures may undermine access to formal financial services. |
| JEL: | G21 G40 O30 |
| Date: | 2026–07–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smx:wpaper:2026008 |
| By: | Andrew, Alison; Krutikova, Sonya; Smarrelli, Gabriela; Verma, Hemlata |
| Abstract: | The social environment is key to sustaining gender inequalities but many policies and programs target only women and do not involve the wider community. Can such approaches work or, by pushing women to break accepted norms, do they expose women to stress and backlash? What are the impacts of engaging the wider community? We use a 3-armed RCT covering 5000 adolescent girls across 125 communities in rural Rajasthan to explore these questions. We assess the impacts of weekly Girl Groups that worked only with adolescent girls and the impacts of additionally engaging the wider community. Both models led to a reduction in school dropout and early marriage. However, targeting adolescent girls without involving the broader community led to an increase in girls adopting a ruminative thinking style and no improvements in depression and anxiety. By contrast, when the wider community was engaged, girls' symptoms of depression and anxiety fell by 0.16 SD and 0.17 SD respectively and there were no negative impacts on rumination. We show evidence that such improvements in mental health may have resulted from the community engagement changing prevailing attitudes and internalized norms. |
| Keywords: | Development; Gender |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21508 |
| By: | La Ferrara, Eliana; Yanagizawa-Drott, David |
| Abstract: | We survey recent research on changing culture and social norms in developing countries and propose a simple framework to interpret these changes. We conceptualize individual utility from a given action as a function of three components: intrinsic valuations, material payoffs, and social interactions. Using this lens, we review evidence on interventions that target each component and their interactions. First, we discuss efforts to shift intrinsic values through schooling and curricula, information campaigns, mass media, and empowerment programs, with particular attention to gender norms, intimate partner violence, and harmful practices such as female genital cutting. Second, we examine social determinants of behavior, including misperceptions about others’ beliefs, coordination failures, and the role of intermediate “stepping-stone†actions in facilitating or hindering norm transitions. Third, we analyze how changes in material incentives, via labor market opportunities, transfers, and legal reforms, affect behavior and underlying norms. Throughout, we highlight methodological challenges in measuring norms and identifying mechanisms, and we emphasize that policy effects depend critically on existing social structures and belief distributions. We conclude by outlining open questions from a positive and normative perspective. |
| JEL: | O12 Z10 J20 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21242 |
| By: | Ariane Reyns; Marek Hudon; Koen Schoors |
| Date: | 2025–02–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/409544 |
| By: | Grimm, Maximilian; Schularick, Moritz; Verner, Emil |
| Abstract: | Financial liberalization is often seen as a way to deepen credit markets and stimulate economic growth, but it may also fuel credit booms that end in crisis. We construct a new cross-country database of banking regulation policies covering 21 regulatory indicators for 18 advanced economies since World War II. We distinguish liberalizations that directly relax constraints on credit supply from broader financial reforms. Liberalizations that directly affect credit supply lead to substantial expansions in private credit. Credit expansion is concentrated in non-tradable sectors and is not accompanied by higher interest rates or credit spreads in the short run, consistent with an outward shift in credit supply. Real GDP rises over the following 2 to 4 years, but the gains are temporary. On average, GDP returns to trend in the medium run, and there is an increase in the risk of financial crisis and worse downside growth outcomes. Only liberalizations that directly expand credit supply generate these boom-bust dynamics. Based on these estimates, financial liberalization is welfare-improving for coefficients of relative risk aversion below 7.2, a moderately high value. |
| JEL: | E44 G01 G21 G28 N20 O43 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21410 |
| By: | Jeffrey Gardiner |
| Abstract: | This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.18288 |