Suitability of Microfinance as an Investment Option

Karel Janda and Barbora Svarovska

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: This paper investigates investment performance of the most commercially developed microfinance investment funds and it also includes a discussion of major economic characteristics of microfinance investments. When we analyze the relation between microfinance funds' returns and the performance of stock and fixed income markets in developed and emerging economies we find a slightly negative correlation. We show that returns of microfinance investment funds exceed the returns on the market portfolio. Together with reported near-to-zero beta estimates as a proxy for the systematic risk, this means that investment into microfinance investment vehicles may be recommended as a desirable addition to an investment portfolio.

Keywords: microfinance; investment; funds; risk; return (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp470.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp470

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().