Microbank Regulation and Earnings Quality: A Global Survey

Banking regulations have been subject to extensive research and debate for decades. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, the focus on banking regulations and corporate governance has been particularly intense (e.g., Claessens and Yurtoglu, 2013). Simultaneously, within the global microfinance industry, there has been relatively less attention on regulations and other means of external control and transparency enhancing mechanisms (Hartarska, 2010: Beisland et al., 2014). In contrast to the traditional banking industry, the presence of banking regulations is not obvious in the microfinance industry; some microfinance institutions, or microbanks as we label them, are regulated by the national banking authority, others are not, even when they operate in the same national markets and follow similar business models (Mersland and Strøm, 2009). This research is motivated by the substantial double digit growth in microfinance across emerging markets (see e.g., Maes and Reed, 2012), and the positive role of access to credit on poverty alleviation (e.g., Akhter and Daly, 2009).