Microfinance and happiness

Microfinance institutions are used to claim that their impact goes beyond money since rescuing from exclusion uncollateralized poor borrowers significantly affects their dignity, self-esteem, social recognition and, through it, life satisfaction. Our paper aims to verify indirectly this claim by evaluating whether access to microfinance loans has significant impact on life satisfaction beyond its indirect impact via income changes. Our empirical findings on a sample of poor borrowers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires show that, after controlling for survivorship bias, the number of credit cycles has a significant and positive effect on life satisfaction.