Efectos de los techos en las tasas de interés en los microcréditos

Resumen

This paper evaluates the imposition of caps on microcredit lending rates through directed credit policies for productive sectors. This financial inclusion intervention provides a unique quasi-experiment, and we estimate their causal effect following a difference-in-differences analysis. Our results suggest that the imposition of interest rate ceilings negatively affected the number of new microcredits and loans to SMEs granted by MFIs as well as its portfolio balance. Specially, we find robust results that the balance of the microcredit and SMEs’ loan portfolio granted by MFIs, relative to the company´s portfolio granted by banks, decreased by 26.1% for an average MFI for the period 2011-2018.