Targeting Credit through Community Members
研究泰国村级委员会在分配贴息贷款时如何权衡贫困、生产力、风险和偏袒，发现贷款流向了更富裕、低生产力且与精英有联系的村民，导致项目可持续性受损，而消除关系扭曲可降低村内不平等9.7%并小幅提升产出。
Abstract Locally targeted programs may exploit available information transmitted through local networks to improve the selection of beneficiaries, but the effective use of this information is not granted when the selection of beneficiaries entails balancing multiple targeting criteria that are costly to verify. This paper analyzes how local committees balance issues of neediness, productivity, risk, and favoritism to allocate subsidized loans to Thai villagers. Local committees in charge of managing village funds provided credit to richer, less-productive, and elite-connected villagers threatening the program’s sustainability. Informal markets partially attenuated the targeting distortions by redirecting credit from connected to unconnected households, albeit at high interest rates. Counterfactual exercises show that eliminating the connection-based distortions would reduce within-village inequality by 9.7% and modestly increase village-level output by 0.9%–1.5%.