In microcredit institutions, credit officers play a prominent role in loan granting decisions. Indeed, they collect field data, meet with the applicants, and provide personal recommendations to the credit committee that takes the final decisions (loan approval/denial, and loan size). This paper...

This paper studies the role played by credit officers in loan performance. The structural model of credit provision explicitly considers the credit officer's ability at the screening and audit stage. This model is estimated using rich data from VivaCred - a Brazilian NGO. Results suggest that...

Our test procedure for discrimination in lending combines denial rates and recovery rates and is applicable to simple and intersectional discrimination regardless of the profit orientation of the lender. Using a European microcredit dataset, the tests reveal that the positive—and socially...

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 by...