CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Bennett, Jeremy Cowan |
|---|---|
| Title | Beyond the Crowd-out Effect in Microfinance: "Institutional DNA" and IFI Behavior |
| Summary | In microfinance today, there is active competition between commercial investors and public-sector international financial institutions (IFIs) to fund the top-performing microfinance banks. What is odd is that this occurs in spite of a shared mission for the future of the industry—the emergence of commercial self-sustainability. Commercial advocates have suggested that IFIs are ‘crowding-out’ commercial investors by offering underpriced capital to banks, and that this constitutes a hindrance to the industry’s ongoing success. IFIs have argued that they are further needed, even by the top-performers, to provide financing and guidance. One explanation for this looks at the perverse funding incentives that emerge from the bureaucratic nature of IFIs. Yet this does not explain why IFIs agree with commercial advocates—at least in rhetoric—that their missions should be to cultivate riskier MFIs that are unable to receive funding from commercial sources otherwise. This thesis proposes a supplementary hypothesis to understand IFI behavior that centers on the way worldviews are ‘unpacked’ like DNA to constitute the most fundamental properties of an institution—both its function and its form. |
| Supervisor | Astrov, Alex |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/bennett_jeremy.pdf |
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