1361: Reducing Poverty via Cultural Linguistics: The Microfinance Case (10301)

Monday, August 12, 2024

11:30 – 13:00 CT (GMT-5/UTC-5)

Location: Hyatt: Wrigley

Session Number: 1361
Paper Session
Orientation: International,Research
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/bRp4bR

Author(s)

RM

Ronny Manos

College of Management, Israel, Israel
AS

Amir Shoham

Fox School of Business, Temple U.
RS

Riikka Sarala

UNC Greensboro, United States
ST

Shlomo Yedidia Tarba

U. of Birmingham, UK, United Kingdom
AC

Agnieszka Chidlow

-, United Kingdom

In this paper we present a theoretical and empirical examination of cultural linguistics as a way of reducing poverty via microfinance. In doing so, we utilize a large sample of Microfinance Organizations (MFOs) from thirty-three countries over nineteen years to empirically examine if and how linguistic structures impact the prevalence of poverty reduction action using depth of outreach measured as the percentage of female, rural borrowers as well as by loan size. We find that MFOs located in societies where the dominant language allows pronoun dropping or which includes grammatical politeness have a higher prevalence of poverty-reducing actions. The results also indicate that the interaction between pronoun dropping, and grammatical politeness increases MFOs depth of outreach. The study grounds its theoretical development in the grand challenges, microfinance, culture, and linguistic literature. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, we subjected our results to a battery of empirical robustness tests, including casualty analysis.

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