Catherine S. M. Duggan
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Berol Corporation Fellow
Catherine Duggan is Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) course in the required curriculum. Her research examines institutional development, financial-sector regulation, and economic growth in emerging markets, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
Professor Duggan is the author of several Harvard Business School cases, including Nigeria: Opportunity in Crisis?, Uganda: The Constitution of Development, and Negotiating Trust: Borrowers, Lenders, and the Politics of Household Debt. Her current book project, The Institutional Foundations of Lending: Indirect Regulation and State-Building (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), examines the evolution of credit markets, contract enforcement, and financial regulation from the middle ages into modern developing countries. A related project extends these insights to the regulation of modern microfinance, drawing on nearly two years of fieldwork in Uganda.
Professor Duggan received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, where she was the G.J. Lieberman Fellow for the Social Sciences. Prior to attending Stanford, she was an industry analyst for the telecommunications group at the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt (now Mayer Brown LLP), and received a B.A. with highest honors in Political Science from Brown University.
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Research Summary
The Institutional Foundations of Lending: Indirect Regulation and State-Building
by
Catherine S. M. Duggan
The Institutional Foundations of Lending: Indirect Regulation and State-Building makes two main theoretical contributions to the scholarship on credit markets and institutional development. First, the book demonstrates that opportunistic lenders can take advantage of borrowers by collecting collateral over which they have no legitimate claim, and that one of the most fundamental ways institutions support lending markets is to minimize this risk to borrowers. Second, the book shows that states across time and space have used a similar strategy (which I term indirect regulation) to mitigate risks to borrowers and lenders at relatively low cost to themselves. These insights from history lead to novel conclusions about strategies for improving institutions in contemporary developing countries.