Title: Loan Officers Impede Graduation from Microcredit: Strategic Communication in a Large Mic rofinance Institution (coauthored with Natalia Rigol)
Abstract: G raduating borrowers from microcredit to larger loans represents an importan t opportunity for increasing livelihoods. We demonstrate that loan officers impede borrower graduation due to common features of their compensation. W e implement an experiment with 243 loan officers in which we change compens ation and find that it causes loan officers to endorse more borrowers for g raduation. Relative to those endorsed before the change\, borrowers endorse d afterwards exhibit better repayment in graduation loans and their busines ses grow more upon receiving graduation loans. Utilizing existing and novel survey data on the organizational practices of microfinance institutions a round the world\, we find that about half of all microfinance institutions have internal graduation programs and of these between 31% and 54% employ t he same compensation practices as our partner lender. This suggests that lo an officer incentives may be a significant deterrent to borrower graduation worldwide.
LOCATION:IONA 167 GEO:49.260872;-123.113952 URL;VALUE=URI:https://economics.ubc.ca/events/event/ben-roth-harvard-develo pment-political-economy-seminar/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20230312T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR