Microfinance and Gender: Is There a Glass Ceiling in Loan Size?

No 10-047, Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Microfinance institutions serve a majority of female borrowers. But do men and women benefit from same credit conditions? This paper investigates this issue by presenting an original model and testing its predictions on an exceptional database including 34,000 loan applications from a Brazilian microfinance institution over an eleven-year period. The model considers a lender that offers standardized loan contracts with a fixed interest rate, which is common practice in microfinance. It demonstrates that biased loan attribution may lead to three different outcomes, depending on the bias intensity: 1) denial of all applications from a given group, 2) a “glass ceiling” effect, namely loan downsizing of the largest projects from a given group, or 3) no impact. The empirical analysis detects no gender bias in approval rate, but uncovers a glass ceiling effect hurting female applicants. Moreover, this effect is insensitive to the credit officer's gender. In conclusion, the good news is that the microfinance practice does ensure a fair access to credit. The bad news is the presence of a glass ceiling faced by female entrepreneurs with larger projects.

Keywords: Microcredit; Microfinance; Discrimination; Loan Size; Loan Approval; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 J33 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 p.
Date: 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-dev, nep-ent and nep-mfd
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/64289/1/wp10047.pdf wp10047 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Microfinance and Gender: Is There a Glass Ceiling on Loan Size? (2013)
Working Paper: Microfinance and Gender: Is There a Glass Ceiling on Loan Size? (2013)
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:sol:wpaper:2013/64289

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... ulb.ac.be:2013/64289

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().