Research in microfinance

The book provides a review of the research literature on microfinance, a heretofore unorganized domain of inquiry in business and economics. It offers a social exchange perspective, combined with an agency theory specification of the problems associated with microfinance institutions, to make sense of the extant literature. It also illustrates a contemporary problem caused by the oversupply of microfinance, with an empirical investigation of over 200 microfinance institutions in India, and the resulting policy and managerial implications. It concludes with a discussion of the future of microfinance and the likely institutional responses to the globalization of the phenomenon. This is the first volume that attempts to extract a theoretical framework from the prevailing (and rather unorganized) literature in this area. It is also the first volume to provide a test of the Minsky hypothesis of financial bubbles in the context of microfinance, and attempts to derive policy implications in a domain that has largely escaped the scrutiny of financial market regulators.