Vaishnavi Surendra on the Moneylender as Middleman in Rural India

For the next few weeks, I will be speaking to young doctoral and post-doctoral candidates entering the academic and policy works about their newly minted research on Indian political economy. The first scholar in our young scholars’ series is Dr. Vaishnavi Surendra. Vaishnavi is a post-doctoral scholar at University of California, Berkley. She is a development economist working in the area of household finance and her research is focused on studying credit markets in rural India.  Today I’ll be speaking with her on her findings on moneylenders in rural India. In her paper titled, “The Moneylender as Middleman: Formal Credit Supply and Informal Loans in Rural India” Vaishnavi demonstrates that informal moneylenders borrow from the formal banking system and lend to households acting as intermediaries to ease lending capital constraints in rural India. 

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