Are women really risk-averse? The lending behavior of women-owned banking cooperatives in India

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the lending behavior of women-owned cooperatives (WoCs) by exploiting the natural experiment of the financial crisis, employing a novel data set of Indian cooperative banks during 2004–2013.

Design/methodology/approach

In view of the longitudinal nature of the data, the authors employ panel data techniques for the purposes of analysis.

Findings

The findings indicate that WoC banks increased lending to both agriculture and small-scale industries, especially in high-income states. Further disaggregation reveals that the possible weaknesses in asset quality from lending to these sectors in low-income states could be driving the results.

Originality/value

To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies for a leading emerging economy to empirically investigate the behavior of WoC banks and relatedly, how their behavior evolved during the financial crisis.

Citation

Ghosh, S. (2018), "Are women really risk-averse? The lending behavior of women-owned banking cooperatives in India", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol. 37 No. 6, pp. 600-620. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-04-2017-0082