Beatrice Weder di Mauro

Beatrice Weder di Mauro
Professor of International Macroeconomics
SoSe 2010
Department of Economics - FB 03
D-55099 Mainz, Germany
Tel. :+49 (0)6131-3920144
Telefax:+49 (0)6131-3925053
Beatrice.Weder@uni-mainz.de
24.2./2010
Outline for the bachelor seminar in microfinance
Preliminary session
The preliminary session will take place on Wednesday, April 14 th 2010, 10am-12am, at room RW 6.
Participation is compulsory.
Every student should read through the topics before and choose two priorities. The topics will be
allocated during this preliminary discussion. If the topics cannot be allocated according to the
students priorities, the remaining will be drawn.
Mentoring
Contact person for discussion and questions will be Helke Wälde (helke.waelde@uni-mainz.de). If
you have an appointment, be prepared and able to ask detailed questions.
Exposé
Deadline for the exposé is June 2th 2010, 12 pm. Two copies and a pdf-file must be handed in at the
secretariat. The exposé must be written in English and should be at most 5 pages (incl. cover sheet,
graphs, figures, references, excl. appendix). The exposé will be graded and is part of the final score.
The exposé is a detailed outline of the Bachelor-thesis in written form. For the content it is utmost
important to know the relevant literature. You should not only use the denoted literature but also
research and use the economics literature concerning the topic. The exposé should contain a
motivation for the topic, the main points regarding the question must be presented in detail, the topic
must be classified into the academic literature and you should deal with the subject critically.
Presentation
The seminar will take place as a block course on
June 11, Room HS VI – from 9am to 4pm .
All participants have compulsory attendance. Each student must give a presentation in English
about his/her topic. The timing for each presentation is 20 minutes. Afterwards, a discussion will take
place. Both the presentation and the participation in the discussion will be part of the final score.
Each student must prepare a PowerPoint presentation to present his/her topic during the seminar.
To present the topic and the questions it is recommended to use graphs, to illustrate examples or to
present data etc.

Bachelor-thesis
It is required to start the Bachelor-thesis during the winter term 2010/11. The time for processing is 8
weeks and the thesis should be at most 20 pages (incl. graphs, tables, excl. references). Please
take notice of the information for Seminar-, Bachelor- and Diploma-thesis on our website.
Literature
Literature announced with the topics is meant to be a starting point. You should not only understand
this article. For a good bachelor thesis, you have to research the topic, find other articles concerning
the topic, build up an own opinion and write this down in your thesis. Use EconLit or other scientific
databases. Google is not sufficient. Articles should not be much older than 10 years. A short
introduction in using EconLit will be given at the preliminary session.
General reading:
The Microfinance Revolution, Marguerite Robinson, World Bank, 2001-2002
The Economics of Microfinance, Beatriz Armendariz und Jonathan Morduch, MIT Press, 2007
Topics
I. Social connections and social sanctions in group credits
1. The role of social connections for group credits
(Karlan, D.S., (2007), „Social connections and group banking“, Economic Journal. 117, F52-F84.)
2. The mechanism from social sanctions in group credits
(Besley, T. and S. Coate (1995), „Group lending, repayment incentives and social collateral“, Journal
of Development Economics, 46, 1-18.)
3. Critiques on Besley/Coate
(Arnold, L., S. E. Steger and J. Reeder (2009),"Microfinance and markets: New results for the
Besley-Coate group lending model", http://www.wiwi.uni-regensburg.de/arnold/documents
/microcredit_2.pdf?source_opus=476.)
II. Group credit versus individual credit
4. Overview of mechanism
(Townsend, R. M. (2003), „Microcredit and mechanism design“, Journal of the European Economic
Association, 2/3, 468-477)
5. Empirical evidence
(Gine, X. And D. S. Karlan (2008), „Peer monitoring and enforcement: Long term evidence from
microfinance lending groups with and without group liability“, http://karlan.yale.edu/p/bulak.pdf)
III. Outreach versus efficiency
6. Subsidies for banks in microfinance
(Morduch, J. (1999), „The role of subsidies ins Microfinance: Evidence from the Grameen Bank.“,
Journal of Development Economics, 60, 229-48)
7. Performance or Outreach
(Cull, R., A. Demirgüc-Kunt, and J. Morduch (2007), „Financial performance and outreach: A Global
analysis of leading microbanks.“, The Economic Journal, 117, 107-33.)

8. Should (microfinance) banks help poor people or make profit?
(Hermes, N., R. Lensink, and A. Meesters (2008), „Outreach and effiency of microfinance
institutions“, http://som.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/reports/2008/08002/)
IV. Empirical view on the impact of microfinance on poverty
9. Does microfinance help the poor to get out of poverty?
(Khandker, S. R. (2005), „Microfinance and poverty: evidence using panel data from Bangladesh“,
The World Bank Economic Journal, 19 (2), 263-86.)
10. Do group credits help poor woman better than poor man?
(Khandker, S. R. and M. M. Pitt (2003), „The impact of group-based credit on poor households:
Does the gender of participants matter?“, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2991491?cookieSet=1)