Efeitos de Mudanças Regulatórias no Microcrédito sobre os Desempenhos Financeiro e Social das Cooperativas de Crédito

This study investigates whether the performance of credit unions that offer microcredit in Brazil was affected by the advent of Crescer - the national microcredit program. This research fills a gap in the literature because few papers investigate credit unions that work with microcredit and the effects of governmental interventions related to microcredit operations. Studies of this type may help evaluate the impact of governmental interventions on the performance of the institutions that are directly or indirectly affected by them. Based on the extant literature, we compute thirteen indicators for each credit union, related to their financial and social performance. The inferences are based on the implementation of the difference in differences estimator using the advent of Crescer, in 2011, as the exogenous event of interest, and including in the control group the credit unions that did not supply microcredit loans throughout the sample period. This research presents evidence that the volume of clients and microcredit operations performed by Brazilian credit unions was positively affected by regulatory changes that took place in 2011, consistently with the objectives of the governmental intervention. The evidence also suggests that the governmental intervention did not harm the financial sustainability of the credit unions.