Summary Claims have been made that microfinance institutions (MFIs) experience mission drift as they increasingly cater to customers who are better off than their original customers. We investigate mission drift using average loan size as a main proxy and the MFIs lending methodology, main...

Summary We compare the ownership-cost of shareholders firms (SHFs), non-profit organizations (NPOs), and cooperatives (COOPs) involved in microfinance. A paradoxical situation motivates us: most providers, both historically and today, are NPOs or COOPs, while policy papers advocate SHFs. We lay...

This study responds to the need for more empirical knowledge pertaining to the effect of religion on development efforts. We use data from the microfinance industry to study performance differences between Christian and secular Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). We find that Christian MFIs have...

Summary This paper uses a global data set of 350 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in 70 countries to study the common belief that women are generally better credit risks in microfinance than men. The results confirm that a higher percentage of female clients in MFIs is associated with lower...

This paper tests whether social trust affects total factor productivity (TFP). Using both development and growth accounting, we find strong evidence of a causal positive effect of social trust on the level and growth of TFP. We moreover observe that the effect of social trust on TFP runs through...

Summary This paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. It analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries, both developed and...

Studies of the impact of local political risk on foreign direct investment inflows overlook that worldwide FDI comes in waves. Using a simple model we show that the impact of political risk on FDI inflows is likely to be weaker, the larger the worldwide amount of FDI, which may question standard...

Most of the customers of microfinance institutions are female. But do men and women benefit from the same credit conditions? We investigate this issue by presenting an original model and testing its predictions on an exceptional database comprising 34,000 loan applications from a Brazilian...

This paper is the first to draw a global picture of worldwide microfinance equity by taking full advantage of daily quoted prices. We revisit previous findings showing that investors should consider microfinance as a self-standing sector. Our results are threefold. First, microfinance has become...