|
on Microfinance |
| By: | Bailey, Rachel; Hartarska, Valentina |
| Abstract: | The right to legally own and control property is vital to the ability of an individual to receive credit. Women in developing countries often lack property rights and are therefore at a disadvantage when applying for loans. In addition, even where women have been granted equal or near-equal rights as men, there is often a disconnect between what is codified as law and what occurs in practice. Therefore, I seek to examine how women’s property rights, both as codified and in enforcement, affect outreach activities of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) serving women. I initially hypothesized that in MFIs targeting women, the breadth of outreach to women would be positively affected by both the legal strength and enforcement of women’s property rights. Results of a Heckman selection model and a Seemingly Unrelated Regression model both contradict that initial hypothesis, instead showing that MFIs give a far greater portion of their loan funds to women clients in countries with more discriminatory women’s property rights, and that enforcement of property rights does not show any significant effect on the ability of MFIs to reach women borrowers. |
| Keywords: | Microfinance, Microcredit, Financial Inclusions, Access to Credit, Property Rights, Land Rights, Customary Law, Gender, Women, Agricultural Finance, Financial Economics, International Development, Land Economics/Use, Political Economy, G21, J12, J16, K11, K36, K38, Q15, |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:saea17:253159&r=mfd |
| By: | Schmied, Julian; Marr, Ana |
| Abstract: | Poverty is ostensibly a multi-dimensional issue. Economic, social and political forces play a role in its creation as well as in its eradication. Financial inclusion, understood as the provision of micro-loans to populations that have never before had access to lending, has for some time been considered a useful way to help reduce poverty. In this paper, we employ a panel data analysis based on a unique 2008-2010 database on financial inclusion in Peru. Exploiting the variation between departments, our regression results show that financial inclusion does have an alleviating effect on various indicators of poverty. However, coefficients are small and insignificant. Instead, the access to communication technology, such as the internet, plays a superior role in explaining poverty in Peru. |
| Keywords: | Financial inclusion; poverty; microfinance; econometric analysis; Peru |
| Date: | 2016–09–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gpe:wpaper:15863&r=mfd |
| By: | Zenker, Juliane; Herrmann, Tabea |
| Abstract: | Funeral Aid Associations (FAAs) in Northeast Thailand offer micro funeral insurance at affordable premium levels while they barely risk-rate potential members. Due to the set-up of FAAs, high-risk individuals have a monetary incentive to join the insurance. Compared to many other micro insurance schemes, however, FAAs do not seem to face adverse effects of this unregulated selection of high-risk individuals into the schemes. We show that this is partly due to a counter-balancing selection of a sufficient number of low-risk individuals, who deliberately buy insurance despite what their risk types would advice. This is particularly the case for married individuals who self-select into the associations at relatively lower risks. We provide a theoretical framework showing that marriage may reduce mortality risk and at the same time increase insurance demand based on altruistic tendencies towards the spouse. Our results suggest that this preference based selection is able to balance 13 percent of the high-risk type selection based on age, health, and gender. |
| JEL: | D14 D82 G22 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145653&r=mfd |