Credit where credit's due: The enabling effects of empowerment in Indian microfinance

Bibhas Saha and Navjot Sangwan

World Development, 2019, vol. 122, issue C, 537-551

Abstract: We utilise primary data collected from a North Indian village to examine the impact of women’s empowerment on their creditworthiness, as measured by their total annual loan amounts. Our key explanatory variable – an empowerment index – has been constructed using four factors – economic, social, interpersonal and political. We find that more empowered women received greater cumulative loans. We have instrumented empowerment by the sex of the borrower’s first child being male. It seems that in the male-dominated environment of North India, the ‘luck’ of giving birth to first child as a son helps a woman seize opportunities for empowerment. These village-level findings regarding empowerment are consistent with the results we obtain for the whole of North India using a separate and national dataset. We also show that for the rest of India, it is education and not empowerment, that is a more important determinant of loan volumes.

Keywords: Women’s empowerment; Microfinance; Instrumental variable; India; Asia; Principal component analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C36 G20 J16 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:122:y:2019:i:c:p:537-551

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.009

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