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...

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...

This paper compares the loans granted to male and female entrepreneurs by a French microfinance institution (MFI). The sample period is split in two: before and after the MFI implemented France's regulatory EUR 10,000 loan ceiling. In the first period, the MFI does not co-finance projects with...

Regulatory loan ceilings are commonly found in the prosocial lending sector, yet they can have unintended perverse effects. By mitigating the risk of adverse selection, loan caps catalyze co-financing arrangements between subsidized lenders and commercial banks. These arrangements can, in turn,...