Explore the vast range of titles available.

Young Americans are heavily reliant on debt and have clear financial literacy shortcomings. In this paper, we study the effects of exposure to financial training on debt outcomes in early adulthood among a large and representative sample of young Americans. Variation in exposure to financial training comes from statewide changes in high school graduation requirements. Using a flexible event study approach, we find that both mathematics and financial education, by and large, decrease reliance on nonstudent debt and improve repayment behavior. Economics training, on the other hand, increases both the likelihood of holding outstanding debt and the prevalence of repayment difficulties.

We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power, populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000 Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats—driven by forced rather than voluntary departures—and a sharp decrease in the percentage of postgraduate bureaucrats.

We develop a model of the market for federal funds that explicitly accounts for its two distinctive features: banks have to search for a suitable counterparty, and once they meet, both parties negotiate the size of the loan and the repayment. The theory is used to answer a number of positive and normative questions: What are the determinants of the fed funds rate? How does the market reallocate funds? Is the market able to achieve an efficient reallocation of funds? We also use the model for theoretical and quantitative analyses of policy issues facing modern central banks.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) serves as a pivotal mechanism to counteract higher education disparities in South Africa. This pivotal mechanism plays a crucial role in levelling the playing field, ensuring that financial constraints do not hinder individuals from pursuing higher education. However, in recent years, NSFAS has faced challenges, including unpaid loans from graduates, reduced funding for current students, and an ongoing corruption crisis. These issues hamper NSFAS's ability to provide essential financial support, underscoring the need for immediate reforms and strategic interventions. This article aims to scrutinise the challenges encountered by graduates of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in the process of repaying loans and managing debt. Utilising qualitative content analysis, the researcher draws insights from diverse sources such as academic journals, books, reports, and theses, accessed through platforms like Google Scholar, Science Direct, ResearchGate, NSFAS, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) reports, and Council on Higher Education (CHE) reports. The findings spotlight the considerable impact of unemployment on the repayment capacity of South African graduates with NSFAS loans. In the face of a challenging economic milieu and heightened unemployment rates, recent graduates encounter formidable obstacles in attaining financial stability. The conclusion underscores the imperative for collaborative efforts to address these challenges, acknowledging their deep-seated connection to historical inequities and their exacerbation by contemporary economic dynamics. It advocates for a holistic and sustainable restructuring of the higher education financing system, aiming not only to benefit individual graduates but also to contribute to the broader goal of socio-economic transformation within the nation.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) serves as a pivotal mechanism to counteract higher education disparities in South Africa. This pivotal mechanism plays a crucial role in levelling the playing field, ensuring that financial constraints do not hinder individuals from pursuing higher education. However, in recent years, NSFAS has faced challenges, including unpaid loans from graduates, reduced funding for current students, and an ongoing corruption crisis. These issues hamper NSFAS's ability to provide essential financial support, underscoring the need for immediate reforms and strategic interventions. This article aims to scrutinise the challenges encountered by graduates of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in the process of repaying loans and managing debt. Utilising qualitative content analysis, the researcher draws insights from diverse sources such as academic journals, books, reports, and theses, accessed through platforms like Google Scholar, Science Direct, ResearchGate, NSFAS, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) reports, and Council on Higher Education (CHE) reports. The findings spotlight the considerable impact of unemployment on the repayment capacity of South African graduates with NSFAS loans. In the face of a challenging economic milieu and heightened unemployment rates, recent graduates encounter formidable obstacles in attaining financial stability. The conclusion underscores the imperative for collaborative efforts to address these challenges, acknowledging their deep-seated connection to historical inequities and their exacerbation by contemporary economic dynamics. It advocates for a holistic and sustainable restructuring of the higher education financing system, aiming not only to benefit individual graduates but also to contribute to the broader goal of socio-economic transformation within the nation.

Do the repayment requirements of the classic microfinance contract inhibit investment in high-return but illiquid business opportunities among the poor? Using a field experiment, we compare the classic contract which requires that repayment begin immediately after loan disbursement to a contract that includes a two-month grace period. The provision of a grace period increased short-run business investment and long-run profits but also default rates. The results, thus, indicate that debt contracts that require early repayment discourage illiquid risky investment and thereby limit the potential impact of microfinance on microenterprise growth and household poverty.

Education is a significant contributor to human capital. Financial assistance for education through institutional loan serves as the key element for human development, and loan repayment without default makes the education loan product self-sustainable. The systematic review aims to study the various articles related to education loan repayment (ELR) using bibliometric analysis approach and R studio software with the help of biblioshiny package. The study analyses 812 articles published in the Scopus database between 1990 and 2022. The review identifies most relevant authors, most cited articles, publication trends, keywords and themes, and trending topics. The review finds that research in the domain of ELR is at an increasing trend with a growth rate of 7.2% and, in the year 2022, the highest number of scientific publications, that is, 72 articles, was published. The review exhibits that existing research in the field has mainly focused on themes such as repayment burden, financial literacy, financial education, student debt, income, mental health, and loan defaults. The study concludes that highly cited work in educational loan repayment is in the field of medicine, highlighting salary as the key factor for educational loan repayment, and loan repayment is incentivized by the federal government to serve the designated underserved areas through service option loan repayment programs. Methods on designing and marketing new approaches to loan repayment can be researched in future with relation to human resource recruitment and retention by the employers.

The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy- and macroeconomics-based analysis of housing financialisation. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to how funnelling land-related capital flows goes hand in hand with signing off significant parts of future labour, decisionmaking capacity and well-being to mortgage debt repayments. The paper offers two key insights. First, it exemplifies how macroeconomic and policy changes could not have led to the financialisation of housing markets without a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real-estate practices. Second, it expands the framework of analysis of emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. Focusing on the mortgage defaults and evictions crisis in Spain, we document how during Spain's 1997-2007 real-estate boom the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth enrolled livelihoods into cycles of global financial and real-estate speculation, as home security and future wealth became directly dependent on the fluctuations of financial products, interest rates and capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. When, after 2008 unemployment escalated and housing prices collapsed, mortgages became a punitive technology that led to at least 500 000 foreclosures and over 250 000 evictions in Spain.

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the economic stakes, which is inconsistent with optimization frictions. Instead, we show that repayments are consistent with a balance-matching heuristic under which the share of repayments on each card is matched to the share of balances on each card. Balance matching captures more than half of the predictable variation in repayments and is highly persistent within individuals over time.

Microfinance clients were randomly assigned to repayment groups that met either weekly or monthly during their first loan cycle, and then graduated to identical meeting frequency for their second loan. Long-run survey data and a follow-up public goods experiment reveal that clients initially assigned to weekly groups interact more often and exhibit a higher willingness to pool risk with group members from their first loan cycle nearly 2 years after the experiment. They were also three times less likely to default on their second loan. Evidence from an additional treatment arm shows that, holding meeting frequency fixed, the pattern is insensitive to repayment frequency during the first loan cycle. Taken together, these findings constitute the first experimental evidence on the economic returns to social interaction, and provide an alternative explanation for the success of the group lending model in reducing default risk.