Preference for Women But Less Preference for Indigenous Women : A Lab-Field Experiment of Loan Discrimination in a Developing Economy

A field experiment was performed in a controlled laboratory setting to evaluate whether credit officers reject micro-loan applications based on the ethnicity/gender of potential borrowers. Point estimates of a mixed-effects logistic regression suggest that, compared to non-indigenous men, non-indigenous women have two times more chance of loan approval, and indigenous women have 1.5 more chance of loan approval. The interval results regarding ethnic discrimination are inconclusive, however some evidence of taste-based discrimination in credit lending that was favorable for non-indigenous women was found