Search results for "AMF"

Microfinance Mission Drift?

2010

Claims have been made that microfinance institutions (MFIs) experience mission drift as they increasingly cater to customers who are better off than their original customers. We investigate mission drift using average loan size as a main proxy and the MFI?s lending methodology, main market, and gender bias as further mission drift measures. We employ a large data set of rated, multi-country MFIs spanning 11 years, and perform panel data estimations with instruments. We find that the average loan size has not increased in the industry as a whole, nor is there a tendency towards more individual loans or a higher proportion of lending to urban costumers. Regressions show that an increase in av…

Excessive Focus on Risk? Non-performing Loans and Efficiency of Microfinance Institutions

2021

Differentiation in the European Union in Post-Brexit and -Pandemic Times

2022

Paid open access

Adaptation interventions and their effect on vulnerability in developing countries: Help, hindrance or irrelevance?

2021

This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulnerability context; (ii) inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation; (iii) a retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas; and (iv) a lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined. Emerging literature shows potential avenues for overcoming the current failure of adaptation intervent…

The emergence of new industries at the regional level: alignment of organizational and regional industrial culture

2021

This article provides insights into how and where new industries emerge and grow through theoretical reasoning and the advancement of relevant arguments through empirical examples from industry emergence in two Norwegian regions: the establishment of the boatbuilding and the electronics industry in Arendal; and the cancer medicine and educational technology industry in Oslo. The article focuses on culture as an important asset for new industry emergence. We argue that industry emergence is supported if organizational culture in emerging industries and existing or altered regional industrial culture become aligned. The four industry cases demonstrate how in some situations industries emerge …

Financial Vulnerability, Financial Literacy, and the Use of Digital Payment Technologies.

2021

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to test the notion that the use of digital payment methods, such as paying with a mobile phone, increases the risk of financial vulnerability. Research from the USA indicates such a relationship, and we study whether this finding can be generalized to other countries. Motivated by recent changes in EU legislation related to financial transactions, we also examine willingness to use social media companies for money transfers along with sharing bank account information with third-party financial services. Exploiting data collected from a representative sample of the Norwegian adult population (n = 2202), we identify differences in financial behaviour and c…

Revisiting the Duration Dependence in the US Stock Market Cycles

2022

There is a big controversy among both investment professionals and academics regarding how the termination probability of a market state depends on its age. Using more than two centuries of data on the broad US stock market index, we revisit the duration dependence in bull and bear markets. Our results suggest that the duration dependence for both bull and bear markets is a nonlinear function of the state age. It appears that the duration dependence in bear markets is strictly positive. For 93% of the bull markets, the duration dependence is also positive. Only about 7% of the bull markets, those with the longest durations, do not exhibit positive duration dependence. We also compare a few …

Corruption in economics: a bibliometric analysis and research agenda

2020

We conducted a bibliometric analysis of the literature on corruption in the discipline of economics (4,488 articles) over the past 51 years between 1968–2019. Through this methodology, we identifie...

Greenfield or M&A? An institutional and learning perspective on the establishment mode choice of Chinese outward investments

2020

Abstract We develop and test a model of Chinese greenfield investments using institutional and learning theories. Both the host country institutional context and the firm's international characteristics affect the establishment mode. Using 152 Chinese emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) with 401 subsidiaries distributed in 26 countries from 2003 to 2013, we build a database of 284 pairs of host country/Chinese firms to test two hypotheses. We find that, first, governance environment affects the establishment mode: greenfield investments are preferred over acquisitions in relation-based host markets, and M&As are preferred in rule-based countries. Second, the depth of Chinese EMNEs' inter…

Democracy in schools: qualitative analysis of pupils’ experiences of democracy in the context of the Norwegian school

2021

A limited number of empirical studies have explored pupils’ democratic practice and the direct experiences of school children using a qualitative approach. The aim of the present study has been to analyse pupils’ experiences of the practice of democratic rights in the context of the Norwegian school. The study adopts a qualitative methodology, using semi-structured interviews with pupils. Three prominent school arenas were focused on: the mandatory pupil-teacher dialogue, the pupil council and classroom discussions. Three main markers of democracy have been used in the data analysis: contextual openness, participation and the ability to engage in democratic discussions. The findings reveal …