Imperfect Information, Screening, and the Costs of Informal Lending: A Study of a Rural Credit Market in Pakistan
研究巴基斯坦农村非正规放贷人的服务、成本和收费，发现高利率反映了运营成本，市场存在过剩能力和垄断竞争。
Many governments have perceived the rural moneylender as usurious. This article takes a first step toward directly testing the validity of this view. In a study of services, costs, and charges of fourteen informal market moneylenders and their clients in Chambor, Pakistan, the article examines whether the high implicit interest rates charged reflect the actual costs of operating in that market. Estimates of the resource costs incurred by informal lenders for screening, pursuing delinquent loans, overhead, and cost of capital ( including unrecoverable loans) suggest that lenders' charges are equal to their average cost of lending but exceed their marginal cost. This finding is consistent with the view that the informal credit market is characterized by excess capacity and monopolistic competition in the pressure of imperfect information. Copyright 1990 by Oxford University Press.