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The purpose of this study is to evaluate if access to local branch infrastructure of the farm credit system institutions (FCS), banks and credit unions (BCU), and alternative financial services (AFS) providers is related to the use of credit from non-traditional lenders (NTLs). The focus is on beginning and women operators who are typically credit constrained and thus more likely to suffer from closures of bank branches and consolidation of traditional agricultural lenders.

Informed by Detragiache et al. (2000), the authors specify farmers’ use of loans as a function of their access to credit (measured by the branch density of each lender type) along with operator’s and operation’s controls. The measures of loans by NTLs (number, use, share and lender type) require the use of Poisson, Probit, Tobit and Multinomial Logit techniques. This study utilizes individual producer data from the 2018 Agricultural Resource Management Survey and 2018 county-level branch density data for FCS, BCU and AFS providers.

Access to credit from FCS is helpful to BFRs only, while access to AFS is associated with the use of loans from NTLs by women but not by BFRs. As expected, access to BCU credit matters for the use of loans from NTLs, with a complementary effect for BFRs but a substitution effect for women’s use of such loans.

There are no studies on local agricultural credit markets in the US that evaluate the implications from changes in access to credit on credit-constrained borrowers and their use of NTLs’ credit.

This paper identifies factors that affect entry and exit of beginning, young and women farmers and ranchers.

The empirical framework is fixed effects regression analysis that uses county level data to evaluate how barriers to entry, access to and use of credit, local economic environment, and climate affect entry and exit of Beginning Farmers and Ranchers (BFRs). The dataset is assembled from several sources matching the Census of Agriculture years for the period of 1997–2017.

Results show that new farmers are more likely to enter in counties with more and smaller farms and with lower farm productivity, indicating that BFRs have the potential to improve the overall productivity in such counties if able to grow and succeed. The results also indicate that the high capital intensity nature of farming is an effective barrier to entry. BFRs are more likely to do better in counties where agriculture is more important to the economy and with more off-farm work opportunities. The net entry is positively associated with higher input/output price index and the use of insurance but is unaffected by government payments and farm and off-farm income. The authors observe substitutability between farming and alternative self-employment for more entrepreneurial young people. Net entry increases with availability of non-real-estate loans but decreases with real estate credit. Thus, for BFRs to acquire the assets needed to reach optimal scale, access to credit remains essential.

The authors are not aware of other work that estimates how barriers to entry and other economic factors including access to credit affect entry and exit of BFRs of various ages and young and women farmers using the Census of Agriculture data up to 2017.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of the positive impact of the FCS lending on farm incomes which should be useful to policymakers as they consider reforms and further support for this 100-year-old major agricultural lender.

The authors construct a panel for the 1991-2010 period from the FCS financial statements and evaluate how lending by the FCS institutions has affected farm incomes and farm output. The authors use fixed effects estimations and control for credit by other agricultural lenders as well as the stock of capital, prices, and interest rates. Since previous work suggests that rural financial markets are segmented and the FCS serves larger full-time farmers with mostly real-estate backed loans, the authors evaluate the impacts of farm real-estate backed loans and of short-term agricultural loans separately for a shorter period for which the data is available. The authors also perform robustness checks with alternative estimation techniques.

The authors found a positive association between credit by the FCS institutions and farm income and output. The magnitude of the estimated impact is larger during the 1990s than in the 2000s.

The positive link between the FCS institutions’ credit and farm incomes and output supports the notion that the FCS lending was beneficial to farmers. The evidence also supports the segmentation hypothesis of rural financial markets. The financial reports data for 1991-2010 are from the ACAs and FLCAs aggregated on the regional level because there is no clear way to classify FCS lending to a more disaggregate level like the state. The authors also assemble and analyze a state-level data set that contains state-level balance sheet data for the period 1991-2003.

The authors are not aware of another work that directly links (real estate and non-real estate) credit by FCS institutions to agricultural output and farm incomes.

Financial inclusion is measured by the number of people who use the formal financial system and banks in particular. Limited access to formal banking services and the existence of unbanked households is a main policy concern. The authors evaluate how the use of prepaid (reloadable) debit cards by unbanked households affects financial inclusion and specifically the potential for these households to participate in the formal financial system and open a bank account.

The authors apply matching models to analyze survey data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation National Survey of the Unbanked and Underbanked Households from 2009 to 2019 and evaluate how prepaid cards use affects plans to open a bank account.

Unbanked households who use prepaid cards are 5% less likely to open a bank account compared to the matched nonusers of prepaid cards. In addition, prepaid card users are 12% more likely to use nonbanks to transfer money/transact online and 18% more likely to have obtained loans from alternative financial services providers compared to the matched unbanked nonusers of prepaid debit cards.

No previous work has estimated the causal impact of use of prepaid cards on financial inclusion.

The performance, management, and risk exposure of financial institutions operating in rural and agricultural markets determine the cost of agriculture’s ongoing access to financial capital. The evolution of general banking and agricultural finance research contributions in the structure, performance, and risk management of financial institutions lending to agriculture and providing financing to rural markets is described and discussed in this paper. A summary of future research priorities in each of these areas is also provided. Ongoing regulatory change, institution consolidation, financial innovations, and the changes occurring in the agricultural sector drive research opportunities in this area. Ongoing research will be critical to maintain efficient rural financial markets that can provide consistent and competitively priced credit for rural America.

This paper presents an overview of microfinance and microfinance research. The objective is to show that microfinance research has come full circle: from policies to lending methodologies and to organizations in the 1990s, and back to a focus on policies. Specifically, developments in the theoretical literature on asymmetric information, transaction costs, contracts, and banking identify the challenges that MFIs must overcome. Recent trends toward intermediation and commercialization have brought about renewed focus on identifying appropriate policies to promote a viable microfinance industry. The paper concludes by describing some current challenges faced by the industry and offers a possible research agenda for agricultural economists.

The purpose of this paper is to present a statistical examination of the factors affecting the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Data on MFIs operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during the period 1999‐2004 were used in this study. A statistical analysis of the performance of these MFIs was conducted utilizing a cost function approach, which was estimated using seemingly unrelated regressions.

During the study time period, MFIs involved in the provision of group loans and with a higher percentage of loans to women had lower costs. The presence of subsidies is also found to be associated with higher MFI costs.

Providing financial services to women, and use of group loans was associated with lower costs in Eastern Europe and central Asian microfinance institutions in the early 2000s.

This study focuses exclusively on efficiency of MFIs operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the first to explicitly measure outreach efficiency when output is measured by number of active clients, rather than the value of the overall MFI lending portfolio.

In this paper, the authors set out to establish if there is a link between finance and economic growth in rural areas. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relation between credit by major lenders in rural areas – commercial banks and Farm Credit System (FCS) institutions – and economic growth for the period 1991-2010.

The motivation for this work comes from empirical studies showing a link between economic development and financial system development as well as from work which highlights the positive role of long-term finance provided by banks. The authors use two alternative panel data sets and fixed effects models to estimate the causal effect of credit supply (with lagged explanatory variables) on agricultural GDP growth per rural resident.

The authors find a positive association between agricultural lending and agricultural GDP growth per rural resident with additional billion in loans (about a third of the actual average) associated with 7-10 percent higher state growth rate with this association stronger during the 1990s. Regional data confirm these results. The results point to a positive link between credit and economic growth in rural areas during that period, attributable to the lending by FCS institutions and by commercial banks.

Data availability limits the scope of this paper. The authors use state level balance sheet data available for the 1991-2003 period and annual data for 2003-2010 period. An additional regional data set is constructed for 1991-2010 with more aggregated data for the ten USDA agricultural production regions. The small number of panels limits the ability to use more sophisticated econometric models and the choice of dependent variables that captures economic growth.

By provides evidence that agricultural finance and in particular lending contribute significantly to the growth of US agriculture, this paper contributes to the policy debate on weather support for agricultural finance initiatives is justified.

The authors are not aware of another study that has linked agricultural lending by commercial banks and FCS institutions to growth in rural areas in the USA.

Microfinance practitioners have emphasized that appropriate control mechanisms are critical for the success of a microfinance institution (MFI). The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of external governance mechanisms on MFIs' performance, whereby external governance is defined as the control exercised by stakeholders and markets, and accountability mechanisms that operate to enforce internal governance.

This paper uses a database of 108 MFIs operating in over 30 countries and analyzes their performance by adopting an empirical approach usually employed in cross‐country banking research on the impact of market forces and regulation on performance. MFI performance is measured by sustainability and outreach indicators and is modeled as a function of external audit, microfinance rating, and regulatory status and controls for MFI and country‐specific characteristics.

Results indicate that regulatory involvement and financial statement transparency do not impact performance, while some but not all rating agencies may play a disciplining role.

At the time of the study, available data are limited to 108 organizations and since then more MFIs have made their financial statements available, therefore, the hypotheses of this paper can be retested.

Stakeholders should be aware that external control mechanisms in microfinance are weak, thus adequate internal governance mechanisms are important.

This paper offers empirical evidence that external governance mechanisms have limited impact on MFI performance.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of financial derivatives on profitability in agricultural banks. Agricultural banks are new to the derivatives market and are unlikely to use financial derivatives for risk speculation. Thus, the paper also provides evidence on the effectiveness of financial derivatives as a risk management tool in small commercial banks.

The authors use call report data from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for 2006, 2008 and 2010 to estimate an endogenous switching model to evaluate how profitability of derivatives user and non‐user agricultural banks is affected by different risk factors. This approach allows banks' endogenous choices to use financial derivatives to be accounted for, and to build a counterfactual analysis – what user banks' profitability would have been if they did not participate in the derivatives activities.

Results indicate that risk management through financial derivatives in agricultural banks is effective and profitability of derivatives user agricultural banks is less affected by credit risk and interest risk in the sample period. Derivatives' activities have improved agricultural banks' profitability and these impacts were increasing over years. In particular, in 2010 without use of derivatives, user banks would have had one‐third lower profitability.

This research is the first to study the role of derivatives in agricultural banks and also provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of risk management through financial derivatives in agricultural banks.