Mohamed El-Komi is Associate Professor of Economics at the American University in Cairo. He was also Assistant Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University, UK, Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Texas-Dallas and visiting scholar at James Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. His main areas of research are behavioral/experimental economics and Islamic finance. He was the Deputy Director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Finance at Durham University. And he is now the Director and founder of the Behavioral and Economic Decision-Making Lab (BEDMLab) at AUC. Mohamed organized several conferences on Islamic finance, behavioral economics and experimental economics and has been the initiator and guest editor of JEBO’s special issues on Islamic finance. Mohamed’s public service career includes being a diplomat until he became minister plenipotentiary. Mohamed has MA from Warwick University, MSc. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Dallas.
Evaluations of grant programmes have shown that the return to capital is high in developing countries, but the impacts of loans have only been modest. This column, originally published at VoxDev, shows that for microenterprises in Egypt, loans and grants increase incomes similarly, but only among certain recipients.