Descripción
Conventional wisdom and increasing empirical evidence in microfinance hold that
women are better risks than men. In the present work, a logit model controlling for
a range of borrower and loan characteristics was carried out to assess the validity of
this statement by comparing repayment rates. The study includes a sample of loans
disbursed by a Nicaraguan microfinance institution during the years 2003-2004, a
period characterized by high oil prices. A dichotomous dependent variable is created,
taking the value of 1 if the credit turned out to be of the best quality i.e. an “A” credit
by Nicaraguan regulations, and 0 otherwise. The dependent variable is regressed on
variables summarizing the characteristics of the borrower and the loan to investigate
the impact of gender on repayment performance. The results provide significant
evidence that female client’s repayment performance is in fact better than that of
male’s at the conventional levels of statistical significance. However, the results
also show that the perceived difference in gender risk is lower than what popular
wisdom would suggest when borrower characteristics and other exogenous economic
variables are taken into account. With the present sample, we conclude that other
characteristics of the borrower as well as changes in the economic environment can
have a similar or larger impact on risk than gender when it comes to repayment
performance.
