In this essay, we explore cultural impacts on the private entrepreneurship in the post-Doi Moi Vietnam. Some important aspects of the traditional cultural values of the Vietnamese society are explored in conjunction with the socio-economic changes over the past two decades. Traditional cultural...

In this article, we offer a new way of exploring relationships between three different dimensions of a business operation, namely the stage of business development, the methods of creativity and the major cultural values. Although separately, each of these has gained enormous attention from the...

In the paper, we argue that trust is the missing link relating education, institutions, and economic development. We argue that increased trust both increases education and improves legal and bureaucratic institutions, which in turn spurs economic development. We substantiate this intuition with...

This paper identifies factors that explain why microfinance institutions are reaching more clients in some countries than in others. To that end, the paper applies a cross-country analysis on a unique dataset covering 115 countries. Results indicate that the microfinance sector is more present...

This paper studies the relationship between the size of the shadow economy and generalized trust, on a cross-section of countries, both developed and developing, and finds that it is significantly negative. That relationship is robust to controlling for a large set of economic, policy, and...

This paper shines light on subsidy-dependent microfinance institutions (MFIs). Firstly, our model shows that subsidy uncertainty can have pervasive effects on MFIs’ poverty-reduction mission. In particular, we argue that supply-driven uncertainty can lead to mission drift. MFIs maximize...

This paper starts from the observation that 23% of the world’s microfinance institutions (MFIs) manage without subsidies. We examine how unsubsidized institutions cope with their social mission. Overall, the lack of subsidies worsens social performances. However, our results show that...

The social nature of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) is mainly financed by subsidies received from the donors. This paper investigates the relationship between the sustainability and the efficiency of microfinance. Using Yaron’s Subsidy Dependence Index (SDI) as a measure of sustainability, a...

Poverty is multidimensional. In its starkest form, the United Nations Development Annual Reports proxy poverty as combined low levels of income, health, and education. Microfinance, on the other hand, addresses directly the income dimension of poverty, and indirectly health and education....

This paper sheds light on a poorly understood phenomenon in microfinance which is often referred to as a “mission drift”: A tendency reviewed by numerous microfinance institutions to extend larger average loan sizes in the process of scaling–up. We argue that this phenomenon is not driven...