Does Regulatory Supervision Curtail Microfinance Profitability and Outreach?

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Jonathan Morduch, Robert Cull, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt
World Development, Vol. 39, No.6, 949 - 965.

Regulation allows microfinance institutions to take deposits and expand their banking functions, but complying with regulation can be costly. We examine implications for institutions’ profitability and their outreach to small-scale borrowers and women, using a newly-constructed dataset on 245 leading institutions. Controlling for the non-random assignment of supervision via treatment effects and instrumental variables regressions, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that profit-oriented microfinance institutions respond to supervision by maintaining profit rates but curtailing outreach to women and customers that are costly to reach. Institutions with a weaker commercial focus instead tend to reduce profitability but maintain outreach.