Is the Presence of Women on the Branch Credit Committee Important? Evidence from an Iranian Private Bank مقاله

Recent financial literature argues that there are gender differences between men and women, impacting financial decision making and performance. This paper, using data related to micro-loans of an Iranian private (commercial) bank between 2012 and 2018, investigates the effects of the characteristics of the members of the branch credit committees (BCCs), especially gender, on loan quality. Because, the dependent variable (loan quality) is a discrete ordinal variable and based on the Brant test’s result the proportional odds assumption was violated, the generalized ordinal logit model was used. The results of this paper show that increasing the presence of women in BCC improves the quality of micro-lending. Based on the literature and related studies, a potential explanation for these results is that increasing the number of women in the BCC improves the compliance of the decision-making and lending processes with the credit guidelines and recommendations, increases the BCC risk aversion, and reduces the agency problem by improving monitoring in the BCC. Moreover, the results also show that the quality of micro-lending management by BCCs with a higher average age is poorer than that of a younger BCC, and the higher education of the BCC members improves micro-lending quality.