In recent years, both microfinance institutions (MFIs) and banks across the world have been converging towards the financing of small enterprises with high financing needs. This paper scrutinizes whether banks and MFIs compete each other as a result of recent transfor- mations in both industries. In doing so, we study whether the loan strategy of a microfinance institution is shaped by the local presence of a bank. Specifically, we investigate whether bank proximity influences loan conditions provided by one of the largest microfinance institutions in Madagascar. We employ an original panel dataset of 32,374 loans granted to 14,834 borrowers over the period 2008-2014. We find that the closer a bank is located to a given MFI borrower, the larger the loan obtained and the less collateral required. These results are insensitive to several robustness tests for possible endogeneity of distance, sample selection issue, and alter- native specifications. In addition, findings are stronger for larger and more established (older) firms in line with our hypothesis.

中文翻译：

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银行和小额信贷机构竞争吗？马达加斯加的微观证据

近年来，世界各地的小额信贷机构（MFI）和银行都在向具有高融资需求的小企业融资。本文仔细研究了银行和小额信贷机构是否因这两个行业最近的转型而相互竞争。为此，我们研究了小额信贷机构的贷款策略是否受当地银行影响。具体而言，我们调查银行邻近度是否会影响马达加斯加最大的小额信贷机构之一提供的贷款条件。我们采用了原始面板数据集，其中包含 2008-2014 年期间授予 14,834 名借款人的 32,374 笔贷款。我们发现，银行离给定的 MFI 借款人越近，获得的贷款越大，所需的抵押品就越少。这些结果对距离的可能内生性、样本选择问题和替代规范的若干稳健性测试不敏感。此外，与我们的假设一致，对于更大和更成熟（较老）的公司，调查结果更强。