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Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India

The Microfinance industry has been severely affected by Covid-19. We provide detailed insights into how loan officers, the key personnel linking the lender to its borrowers, are affected in their performance and adapt their work to the pandemic. We use administrative records of an Indian Microfinanc...

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Autores principales: Czura, Kristina, Englmaier, Florian, Ho, Hoa, Spantig, Lisa
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35035030
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105812
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author Czura, Kristina
Englmaier, Florian
Ho, Hoa
Spantig, Lisa
author_facet Czura, Kristina
Englmaier, Florian
Ho, Hoa
Spantig, Lisa
author_sort Czura, Kristina
collection PubMed
description The Microfinance industry has been severely affected by Covid-19. We provide detailed insights into how loan officers, the key personnel linking the lender to its borrowers, are affected in their performance and adapt their work to the pandemic. We use administrative records of an Indian Microfinance Institution and detailed panel survey data on performance, performed tasks, and work organization to document how the work environment became more challenging during the pandemic. Loan officers operate in a setting where work from home is hard to implement due to the nature of the tasks and technological constraints. The usual performance indicators appear to be mainly driven by external factors such as the nation-wide debt moratorium. Loan officers worked similar hours, but engaged less in planning activities and completed fewer of the usual tasks. Work perceptions and mental health of loan officers reflect these changes, and perceived stress was particularly high during the period of the debt moratorium.
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spelling pubmed-87434262022-01-10 Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India Czura, Kristina Englmaier, Florian Ho, Hoa Spantig, Lisa World Dev Article The Microfinance industry has been severely affected by Covid-19. We provide detailed insights into how loan officers, the key personnel linking the lender to its borrowers, are affected in their performance and adapt their work to the pandemic. We use administrative records of an Indian Microfinance Institution and detailed panel survey data on performance, performed tasks, and work organization to document how the work environment became more challenging during the pandemic. Loan officers operate in a setting where work from home is hard to implement due to the nature of the tasks and technological constraints. The usual performance indicators appear to be mainly driven by external factors such as the nation-wide debt moratorium. Loan officers worked similar hours, but engaged less in planning activities and completed fewer of the usual tasks. Work perceptions and mental health of loan officers reflect these changes, and perceived stress was particularly high during the period of the debt moratorium. Elsevier Ltd. 2022-04 2022-01-10 /pmc/articles/PMC8743426/ /pubmed/35035030 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105812 Text en © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Czura, Kristina
Englmaier, Florian
Ho, Hoa
Spantig, Lisa
Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title_full Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title_fullStr Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title_full_unstemmed Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title_short Microfinance loan officers before and during Covid-19: Evidence from India
title_sort microfinance loan officers before and during covid-19: evidence from india
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8743426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35035030
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105812
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