Gender differences in the repayment of microcredit: The mediating role of trustworthiness

Growing evidence suggests that women are more likely to repay collateral-free microloans than men. However, we know little about what explains such gender differences. We hypothesize that better repayment performance of women microcredit borrowers can largely be explained by gender differences in innate trustworthiness. We conduct a trust game and a microloan repayment game in rural Bangladesh. We find that women are more trustworthy than men...