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Title: Mobile Money, Trade Credit, and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence
Author(s): Thorsten Beck, Haki Pamuk, Ravindra Ramrattan and Burak Uras
Publication Date: September 2015
Keyword(s): Kenya, mobile money, small business finance and trade credit
Programme Area(s): Development Economics and Financial Economics
Abstract: Using a novel enterprise survey from Kenya (FinAccess Business), we document a strong positive association between the use of mobile money as a method to pay suppliers and access to trade credit. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, imperfect credit markets and the risk of theft to account for this empirical pattern. Mobile money dominates fiat money as a medium of exchange in its capacity to avoid theft, but comes with higher transaction costs. The interaction between risk of theft and limited access to trade credit generates demand for mobile money as a payment method with suppliers and the use of mobile money in turn raises the value of a credit relationship and hence the willingness to apply for trade credit. Calibrating the stationary equilibrium to match a set of moments that we observe in Kenyan FinAcces enterprise survey data and quantifying the importance of the endogenous interactions between mobile money and trade credit on entrepreneurial performance and macroeconomic development, we find that the availability of the mobile money technology increases GDP by 0.33-0.47%.
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Bibliographic Reference
Beck, T, Pamuk, H, Ramrattan, R and Uras, B. 2015. 'Mobile Money, Trade Credit, and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=10848