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- Title
On Ethical Violations in Microfinance Backed Small Businesses: Family and Household Welfare.
- Authors
Nilakantan, Rahul; Iyengar, Deepak; Datta, Samar K.; Rao, Shashank
- Abstract
The microfinance business model focuses largely on lending to the woman in the household, rather than the man. The belief is that women are more trustworthy borrowers than men, and that lending to women may have increased social impact. Yet in several cases, women do not have control over the loan backed business despite being the borrower of record. Such takeover of the business by the man constitutes an ethical violation. We find that high dependency ratios in the family are correlates of such ethical violations. Further, we also find that ethical violations have a significant economic cost, consistent with prior scholarship in the family-business domain. While access to microfinance increases household welfare, this beneficial impact reduces by over 50% in the presence of an ethical violation. Our results suggest that microfinance lenders need to move beyond the traditional role of just being a lender to providing advice on issues like family planning, and money management, and enforcement, thus moving closer to the solidarity economy paradigm of integrating savings and credit into broader canvases of social relationships and social structures.
- Subjects
MICROFINANCE; SMALL business finance; MORTGAGE-backed securities; TRUST; SOCIAL impact; FAMILY loans
- Publication
Journal of Business Ethics, 2021, Vol 172, Issue 4, p785
- ISSN
0167-4544
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10551-020-04499-0