Reidar Øystein Strøm

• Dr.Oecon
• Professor Emeritus at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University

We investigate if the CEO’s gender plays a role in microfinance institutions (MFIs) inclusion of poor families into a formal financial relation. Financial inclusion comprises inclusion of the poorest segments of borrowers (the intensive margin), and the number of borrowers (the extensive margin). The data set is a unique global panel of MFIs collec...

The Norwegian Gender Balance Law (GBL) was proposed in June 14th 2003, made into a law on December 9th 2005, and implemented from January 1st 2006 with a two-year grace period. The law mandates at least 40\% board representation for both gender in PLC companies. The government gave two main promises, one that gender equality would increase with the...

Purpose This study is motivated by recent research suggesting that the funding benefits of using Big Four auditors may not be as uniform as were previously assumed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between use of Big Four auditors and access to debt capital by applying data from microfinance institutions (MFIs) in emerging c...

A textbook for a second-level course in Corporate Finance. Language: Norwegian

This research advances the hypothesis that female leaders – chief executive officers (CEOs), chairs, and directors – of a microfinance institution (MFI) give more priority to the poorest families in loan provision than male leaders do. We differentiate between a depth and a width dimension of financial inclusion. The data set is a unique global pan...

Is the low percentage of women on boards due to discrimination? Discrimination has a time dimension; it is repeated period after period and is thus highly persistent. This persistence is tested with data from Norway before quota regulations were instituted in 2003. The data consist of an unbalanced panel sample of all non-financial listed companies...

This paper investigates the relations between female leadership, firm performance, and corporate governance in a global panel of 329 Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in 73 countries covering the years 1998–2008. The microfinance industry is particularly suited for studying the impact of female leadership on governance and performance because of its...

Until a few years ago, most microfinance research was published in development journals and often focused on whether access to finance is beneficial for economically poor entrepreneurs and families (Mersland, 2009a). Over the last few years the scope of microfinance research has broadened. In particular, the ‘business’ of microfinance has become an...

Controversies have been a hallmark of microfinance in the years following the initial euphoria due to the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Grameen Bank and Mohammad Yunus. MFIs have been accused of making people credit-dependent. How, though, do we measure their success or lack of it? This paper aims to discuss various ways of measuring MF...

Microfinance is a global high-growth industry, in which entrepreneurship is prevalent and substantial. Based on the theoretical argument that microfinance entrepreneur-chief executive officers (CEOs) are “motivated agents” with a unique ability to hire and socialize mission-oriented staff, we hypothesize that these CEOs produce more sustainable mic...

This study uses a unique, hand-collected sample of microfinance institutions from 73 countries that typically are not investigated in accounting research to analyze the relationships between audit quality and governance mechanisms. We examine two measures of audit quality, namely, the use of Big Four auditors and the presence of internal auditors w...

Is the microfinance institution (MFI) able to charge unduly high lending rates and obtain a profitability incompatible with perfect competition? We use a global panel data set of MFIs. The Panzar and Rosse revenue test in static and dynamic versions is employed, together with analyses of price (the lending rate) and return on assets. We control for...

Motivert av den senere tids kritikk av mikrofinans, blant annet slik den fremkom i en dokumentar kalt «Fanget i mikrogjeld» som ble sendt på NRK i november 2010, undersøker vi i denne artikkelen hvorvidt mikrofinanstilbyderne (MFIene) krever uforholdsmessig høye renter, hvorvidt profittjaget er økende, og om MFIene beveger seg bort fra de fattige k...

Microfinance is a global high growth industry – in which entrepreneurship is prevalent and substantial. In fact, we identify that in 38% of the surveyed microbanks the CEO has been active since start-up. This study utilizes data from 286 microbanks in 73 developing countries – assessed between 1998 and 2008. Specifically, we study whether CEO found...

Microbanks serve micro-enterprises and poor people with financial services. This study examines how various aspects of international influence affect microbanks' financial and social performance. Grounded in agency theory and resource-based theory, we argue that there are multiple ways that the internationalization of microbanks might affect perfor...

The microfinance industry carries every sign of an innovation in its take-off phase. The various aspects of the microfinance innovation were developed in the 1980’s, twenty years later the industry experiences a phenomenal growth rate, and it has diffused to most developing countries in the world. This review paper looks at microfinance as an entre...

  This paper analyzes the economic rationale for board regulation in place and for introducing new regulation in the future. We relate the value of the firm to the use of employee directors, board independence, directors with multiple seats, and to gender diversity. Our evidence shows that the firm creates more value for its owners when the board h...

Summary 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 MFIs lending methodology, main market, and gender bias as further mission drift measures....

We investigate the microbank’s choice of lending methodology with particular emphasis on group and individual loans. The repayment hypothesis says that the group loan is chosen since borrowers repay under a group loan scheme. The dual objectives hypothesis investigates the choice when the microbank seeks both financial sustainability and outreach t...

We examine the relationship between firm performance and corporate governance in microfinance institutions (MFI) using a self-constructed global dataset on MFIs collected from third-party rating agencies. Using random effects panel data estimations, we study the effects of board and CEO characteristics, firm ownership type, customer-firm relationsh...

This paper aims to explain the choice of board and CEO characteristics in microfinance institutions (MFI). Explanations are sought in substitution or complementarity between the characteristics, external governance variables, and financial performance and outreach performance to the poor. The data are from 290 MFIs in 61 countries, and the logit re...

Microfinance – the provision of financial services to the poor – is high on the public agenda. We discuss and evaluate three myths regarding microfinance based on new data from rated microfinance institutions (MFIs). The first myth is that an efficient MFI needs to be shareholder owned; second that its governance should first and foremost address t...

Policy advocates argue for the transformation of non-government Microfinance Organisations (MFOs) into shareholder owned firms (SHFs). This paper investigates whether the proposed superiority of shareholder owned MFOs is empirically supported. The findings indicate that the difference between shareholder owned MFOs and non-government MFOs is minima...

The relative timing of CEO and director departures indicate whether the CEO-board relationship is one of board control, CEO control or joint control. Using a panel data set of non-financial Norwegian listed companies I find strong evidence of simultaneity of CEO and director turnovers. Firm performance, internal and external stockholdings, board co...

The employee stakeholders have a lawful right to board representation in Norway. In this paper, I explore the direct and indirect effects of employee directors upon firm performance in a panel of all non-financial Norwegian listed firms from 1989 to 2002 using the fixed effect estimation methodology. I set up a simultaneous equation estimation mode...

This paper explores how board composition influences the conflict of interest between principals and agents, the production of information for monitoring and advice, and the board's effectiveness as a decision-maker. Paying particular attention to the board's independence, information production, and diversity, we exploit unusually rich data from a...

Tourism has been, and still is, a very profitable industry in Spain. But the Spanish model of tourism development, following a pattern set in the 1950s, is now in crisis. The crisis is apparent in the widespread overdevelopment of tourist resorts and residential facilities in coastal areas, generating high environmental, social and economic costs....

Suppliers of microfinance are typically Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), cooperatives or specialized microfinance institutions incorporated as Shareholder Firms (SHFs). Leaving out the cooperatives we study whether NGOs and SHFs differ in bringing along social benefit to their clients. Specifically, is there a trade-off between different dime...

Over the last decade, cross-border activity has increased considerably in the food industry. So far, the internationalization of food producers has attracted most of the attention. In this paper, we argue that food chains also play an important role in the recent changes of the food industry, and that the behavior of such chains needs to be taken i...