Learning from Poverty: Why Business Schools Should Address Poverty, and How They Can Go About It.

In the past few years, business schools have begun to address poverty issues in their teaching, learning and curricula. While this is a positive development, the arguments for reconfiguring educational programs to address such matters remain undeveloped, with much of the impetus for such endeavors rooted in calls for social responsibility in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the Social Compact, the Principles for Responsible Management Education and benchmarks such as ISO 26000. This article seeks to clarify the pedagogical grounds for integrating poverty issues in management education by examining the intellectual and personal development benefits of doing so. By critically examining four modes of business involvement in poverty reduction, the article shows how such initiatives can be used as intellectual lenses through which to view the complex and often paradoxical interconnections between socioeconomic and environmental systems. It is thus concluded that a consideration of poverty issues is not a marginal matter, but is key to grasping the 21st century complexities of global business and management

Subjectivity in Credit Allocation to Micro-Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Brazil

This paper estimates the impact of loan officer subjectivity on microcredit granting by exploiting an exceptionally detailed database from a Brazilian microfinance institution. The loan officers collect field data, meet with applicants, and make recommendations to the credit committee, which has the final say on both loan approval and loan size (LS). The loan officer’s subjectivity is captured through gender bias. Our estimations indeed show subjective gender gap in LS. This gap is almost exclusively attributable to loan officers. We interpret this finding as evidence that, despite monitoring and wage incentivization, microcredit officers let their subjective preferences interfere with loan granting. We conclude by suggesting alternative means to curb subjectivity in credit allocation to micro-entrepreneurs.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Are Competitive Microfinance Services Worth Regulating? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

In recent years there is increasing appetite for regulation of financial institutions after the 2008 financial crisis. Policy questions such as whether competitive micro finance institution (MFI) requires strong regulation to reduce, for example credit risk or competition and regulation operate in the opposite direction, which each tends to dampen the effect of the other, is an empirical issue that this paper provide answers based on data on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the period 1995 to 2015, utilizing panel data approaches. Finding from the study indicates that competition increases credit risk among MFIs in SSA, which regulation helps reduce such behaviour. The effect of regulation on credit risk is conditional on the level of competition, at the first percentile of competition; regulation does not reduce credit risk behaviour of MFIs, but does at competition level above the 25th percentile. Regulation on the other hand does not affect operational risk at any level of competition