Results-based financing (RBF) schemes in health care are premised on the notion that “paying for results” rather than for inputs is more likely to improve performance. But getting from that attractive hypothesis to program efforts that improve quality of care and outcomes at population scale—in the real world—is far from simple. The article by Gergen in this issue of GHSP offers an overview of ...

Background: There are several factors that lead to the growth or decline of the nonperforming loans, such as macroeconomic variables and bank specific variables, banks ownership structure, corruption and information sharing. Among them one of the main factors that affect the non-performing loans are the corruption. In developing countries corruption plays very important role in the growth of no...

Student Loans Repayment and Recovery: International Comparisons Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two issues in this paper, for 44 loans schem...

This paper examines the reporting of bank loans in the financial press during the 2004-2007 period. More specifically, it uses a unique hand-collected data set to examine the frequency and determinants of loan reporting. The motivation is double folded. First, virtually all publicly traded firms borrow from banks. However, despite their widespread use, the reporting of bank loan agreements in t...

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccol6 Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547-84), and inde...

An encompassing model of a business loan contract with the bank is constructed to establish the roles and relative importance of asymmetry of information, market power, borrower (entrepreneurial) effort and quality in explaining contract features. Special cases of the model include symmetric versus asymmetric information regimes, competition versus monopoly power, adverse selection versus moral...

This article reviews recent developments in the US and UK in response to rising foreclosures, with an emphasis on the provision of advice or counseling to borrowers in mortgage default. Both nations have increased support for counseling programs despite the lack of evidence that counseling is effective. Based on a quantitative study in the US and a qualitative study in the UK, this article prov...

Microfinance loans have expanded greatly in the recent years as a way of helping the poor gain cheaper loans, but percentage take-up of microcredit has remained lower than expectations. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, this paper uses a randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microfinance loans in a new urban setting in Hyderabad, India, to determine if lack of flexibility i...