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The purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of the role of computer usage in determining the credit score for small business owners.

Bitler, Robb, and Wolken report over three‐quarters of all small business use computerized systems. Since such systems are faster, more accurate, and less fallible than manual systems, we investigate whether increased use of computers leads to better credit ratings and leads to access to larger credit lines.

The results suggest that computer usage has virtually no effect in the determination of credit by financial service providers. Credit analysis and risk measures dominate the decision‐making process.

The 3,561 surveyed firms are skewed toward very small firms with approximately 64 per cent having less than five employees and an 20 per cent having less than ten employees. Forty per cent of the firms have annual sales of less than $100,000 while only 1.8 per cent of the firms have sales in excess of $10 million.

Computerization is an operational necessity but credit worthiness is a function of the overall management characteristics of the firm and not the tools employed by the management team.

A minority of small businesses do not use computerization and these tend to be among the smallest in size and with the lowest levels of credit‐worthiness. Nonetheless, credit worthiness is determined by standard credit analysis and risk measures rather than operational efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the farm and rural credit system in China. To do this the authors use the so‐called “7 Cs” of credit (these include: Credit, Character, Capacity, Capital, Condition, Capability, and Collateral) and for each “C” provide some aspect of importance related to agricultural finance.

This paper is largely based on a survey of 897 farm households in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, and extensive interviews of agricultural lenders conducted in the summer and fall of 2009. These data are used in simple form and in regression form to explain a variety of credit issues in China.

A number of key factors related to credit delivery and demand are found. First, using the 7 Cs as a guide proved to be very fruitful for disentangling the many institutional and cultural facets affecting rural credit in China. Under “Character” the authors discuss the cultural characteristics of the Chinese farmer in terms of informal lending and borrowing; under “Capacity” the authors discuss the challenges of delivering credit to farms with limited resources; under “Condition” the authors discuss group guarantees and credit worthy villages, credit rationing and insurance and incomplete markets; under “Capability” the authors discuss income inequality and challenges in economies of scale and size; and for “Collateral” the authors discuss the implications of lack of collateral and limitations on farm economic growth due to the collectivization of land and the potential for agricultural lending from the transferability and mortgagability of land or forestry use rights.

Although the assessment provides a great deal of breadth and depth across many credit‐related issues in China, it is not an exhaustive study. Agricultural and rural credit in China is very complex and in many instance under developed. The survey results from Shaanxi and Gansu tell a story that is consistently told throughout China, but the authors would caution against using the data to characterize farm credit across China as a whole.

Large swaths of China have either no or very rudimentary credit services. Even in areas where credit is in supply there are issues of poverty that could be aided with credit access and delivery. In order to improve livelihoods through credit institutions, it is important to understand rural credit in many dimensions. This paper takes a step in that direction.

Despite the importance of rural credit in China, it is largely understudied and not well understood. This paper makes progress in providing such an understanding. Our reasoning for using our unique approach is that by understanding the 7 Cs of credit one comes to understand the elemental characteristics of the credit decision from the lender's point of view but in a way that takes into account conditions at the farm level. The 7 Cs provide an objective approach to credit assessment that balances both the supply of and demand for credit.

In contrast to common literature that suggests that trade credit is an extremely expensive source of financing with annual interest rates exceeding 40 percent, this paper seeks to argue that the average interest rate of trade credit does not exceed the cost of alternative funds, thereby explaining why trade credit constitutes a substantial part of the optimal financing mix of large, liquid, and capital market listed firms.

Besides providing a formula for estimating a firm's actual trade credit interest rate, this paper is mainly based on a descriptive analysis of trade credit use as well as on survey results of a broad range of prior studies.

The paper finds that highly liquid firms use substantial amounts of trade credit, thus indicating that trade credit use per se cannot be as expensive as literature supposes. In line, estimated average interest rates are about 4 to 6 percent.

By arguing that actual cost of trade credit use is far from being as high as literature supposes, this paper provides important implications for optimal short‐term financing strategies as well as for the assessment of trade credit use in credit worthiness analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if credit rationing persists even in the era of financial liberalization, the extent to which individual, firm and loan characteristics influence the rationing behavior of commercial banks and whether the agricultural sector is discriminated against in the commercial bank credit market.

The study employed a probit model with marginal effects and a generalized Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition estimation on a randomly selected data of 1,239 entrepreneurs from eight commercial banks’ credit records about their individual, firm and loan characteristics.

The study revealed that credit rationing persists and that applying for a relatively longer payment period, providing collateral and guarantor, being illiterate, being relatively older and being in the agricultural sector increases the likelihood of being credit rationed, while having some relationship with the bank, having non-mandatory savings and applying from a bank with relatively high interest rates reduce the likelihood of being credit rationed. The study also revealed a credit gap of 17.77 percent and a positive discrimination against borrowers in the agricultural sector as the gap was largely being influenced by unexplained factors.

The research was intended to cover a large number of commercial banks in Ghana. However, most of the banks were unwilling to provide such information about their borrowers; hence, the research was limited to only eight commercial banks who provided the author with the information needed for the study.

The study concludes that policies that enhance human capital, women, and older access to credit and agricultural-oriented financial services and others, will go a long way to reduce rationing and increase access to credit, especially to the agricultural sector.

The research proposes the use of group lending as a form of collateral and monitoring to ease risks and default, and hence supports sustainable funding to increase access and outreach.

The paper looks at the comprehensive way about the various factors determining credit rationing in that it considers not only the individual, economic/firm and loan characteristics but also the extent to which discrimination toward the agricultural sector exists in the commercial banks credit market.

Based on a survey of 897 farm households, the purpose of this paper is to build a framework using cluster analysis to explain how farmers make decisions on joining group guarantee, and analyzes factors influencing their decisions using multinomial and binary Logit regressions.

The approach of combining cluster analysis with Logit regression is an innovative approach to survey assessment. In addition, by design the authors have identified the four mutually exclusive groups of borrowers combining Group Guarantee membership and actual formal borrowing.

An extremely important observation according to the data is that most farmers appear to be part of group guarantees only because they have to in order to get access to formal credit products. 87.21 percent of the people who belong to groups and utilize the formal credit products belong to this category because their lenders have made participation in groups compulsory for access to credit. This may ration farmers’ willingness to even apply for credit. It also indicates a preference on the part of older and more risk-averse respondents to avoid participation in group guarantees. Out of financial characteristics the total loan holdings appears to be the only significant indicator of participation in group guarantees. Furthermore the results indicate that informal and formal credit appear to be replaceable for farmers.

The survey is confined only to the counties investigated. China is very diverse in its agricultural economies and many RCCs operate under different guidance and rules from those investigated here. Hence, while the authors can claim that the results are indicative, the authors cannot claim that they will hold generally.

Based on group guarantee loan mechanism and survey data analysis of 897 farm households, this paper analyzes influencing factors affecting farmers’ participation in group guarantees from microcosmic level, so as to provide some reference to further perfect micro credit operation mode and mechanism.

The results indicate that the Group Guarantee mechanism, while beneficial to some, may not hold global appeal for Chinese farmers. In the future RCCs may want to consider alternative approaches to loan security than placing the burden of guarantee on farmers’ family and friends.

The approach of combining cluster analysis with Logit regression is an innovative approach to survey assessment. In addition, by design the authors have identified the four mutually exclusive groups of borrowers combining Group Guarantee membership and actual formal borrowing.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the current mortgage system in Egypt.

The institutional and regulatory structures of two international mortgage systems, namely: the USA and the Malaysian were examined through an extensive literature survey. On the other hand, data on the Egyptian mortgage system were collected, analyzed, then compared to both practices.

The results identified several limitations in the Egyptian mortgage practice such as: inefficient procedures of property registration; absence of an efficient mortgage secondary market; relatively high‐mortgage lending rates; non‐existence of various types of mortgage instruments and lack of credit enhancement tools.

The study presented several recommendations for improving the existing mortgage practice, among which were: realizing a proper secondary market and lowering mortgage lending rates.

By 2002, a sharp decline was experienced in the sales of housing units due to the various credit restrictions adopted by banks, coupled with high‐interest rates in relatively short amortizing periods. Accordingly, home finance process was held up, as the purchasing power of low‐ and middle‐income homebuyers was not sufficient to buy homes with such provisions. This situation imposed the need for a long‐term housing financing mechanism that would directly retrieve the residential construction sector.

This research was innovative in the sense that it directed the Egyptian Government's attention to the existence of Cagamas in Malaysia and accordingly, the first liquidity facility company in Egypt was established in June 2006.

One important issue international firms must face involves the evaluation and control of credit risk. Many studies dealing with international credit management have focused on the practices used by multinational enterprises. In this study we take a different approach to this topic by analyzing the credit management decisions made by 188 U.S. foreign subsidiaries. We examine many aspects of the foreign subsidiary manager's credit policies including credit standards, credit terms, collection efforts and customer creditworthiness. The results of this study indicate that credit management practices of foreign subsidiaries are similar to those used by parent companies. In addition, the findings show that foreign managers generally use theoretically‐preferred methods when making credit decisions.

Shows that loan loss expectation plays an important role in determining credit rationing. Shows that the optimal loan size depends on the marginal loan loss, and not on the initial portfolio position of the bank. While an increase in loan administrative costs leads to a larger optimal loan size, restricting the loan size is used to minimize default risks. Also shows that under conditions of uncertainty when default risk is present, and if absolute risk aversion is increasing in wealth, a rise in wealth of the bank will lower the amount of asset to be allocated in risky loans even if credit can be properly priced.

This paper aims to identify factors that affect agricultural mortgage default and prepayment.

Using a sample of farm credit system loans, prepayment and default are modeled as competing risks with potentially non‐stationary covariates using a statistical/econometric technique called survival snalysis (SA).

The analysis suggests that the primary drivers of prepayment and default are the rate of interest charged by the lender at origination and the borrower's current ratio at origination. Tests of the existence of a geographic effect indicate that despite bank management belief to the contrary, branches may not be homogeneous.

This analysis would be improved if more data were available in an easily obtainable manner to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Unobserved heterogeneity or incomplete specification within a model can be problematic. Inferences among regression coefficients can be problematic in that the estimates have inflated variances and unreliable test statistics. In addition, more frequent measures of the time‐varying covariates could be obtained to improve upon the SA models presented above. Future analyses could also incorporate other sections of the agricultural credit association portfolio, as well as a comparison to variable rate notes. One other logical next step would be to obtain loan collateral values to obtain estimates of the exposure at default, and the loss given default, or the estimates needed for the advanced internal ratings based approach described in the Basel Accords.

This paper provides a method for lenders to measure and model mortgage termination, an important consideration for risk managers when determining capital adequacy described in the Basel Accords.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of creditors' undervaluing the total expected cost of a borrower's bankruptcy filing because a portion of the cost will be borne by other lenders. Creditors who bear a smaller portion of the total cost of a personal bankruptcy would be expected to take less care to avoid triggering one.

This paper presents a theoretical model of a creditor's decision of how aggressively to pursue collection. The model shows that because each lender's collection actions increase the probability of bankruptcy, each lender will collect more aggressively when a borrower has many loans. The paper tests the predictions of the model using a large dataset of credit card accounts.

The model highlights an important testable result: holding the level of debt constant, a borrower with many loans is more likely to choose formal bankruptcy and less likely to choose informal bankruptcy, i.e. chronic non-repayment absent a bankruptcy filing. This paper finds evidence that strongly supports the predictions of the model. Laws that limit creditor collection actions do not appear to mitigate the effects of increasing number of loans.

While a few papers have tested whether strategic interactions may impact business bankruptcy, no paper of which the author is aware has provided clear empirical evidence of the existence of common pool effects in the personal credit market. These effects point to an important and potentially underappreciated source of risk for borrowers and creditors in this market.