The growth and financial sustainability of a firm is tied to its ability to retain existing and potential clients. On the contrary, the defection of customers has a huge implication on firms including microfinance institutions (MFIs), suggesting that the attainment of customer loyalty is an important strategy for MFIs to improve their performance. Hence, this study attempts to investigate the level of loyalty demonstrated by rural microfinance borrowers toward their respective service providers. To accomplish this, an unbalanced panel data, comprising 1101 unique MFIs and spanning the timeframe 2010–2018, were obtained from the World Bank database and thereafter subjected to conventional econometric techniques and a series of robustness tests, including endogeneity-corrected methods, alternative proxies, and sub-sample analyses. The findings indicate that rural microfinance borrowers generally demonstrate loyalty to their service providers, particularly when measured by borrower retention rates; however, these findings vary with the adopted techniques, sub-samples, and proxies employed during the analysis.

中文翻译：

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农村小额信贷借款人的忠诚度：国际证据

公司的增长和财务可持续性与其留住现有和潜在客户的能力息息相关。相反，客户流失对包括小额信贷机构（MFI）在内的企业产生巨大影响，这表明获得客户忠诚度是小额信贷机构提高绩效的重要策略。因此，本研究试图调查农村小额信贷借款人对其各自服务提供商的忠诚度。为了实现这一目标，从世界银行数据库中获取了由 1101 个独特小额信贷机构组成、时间跨度为 2010 年至 2018 年的不平衡面板数据，然后采用传统计量经济学技术和一系列稳健性测试，包括内生性校正方法、替代代理方法等。和子样本分析。研究结果表明，农村小额信贷借款人普遍表现出对其服务提供商的忠诚度，特别是在以借款人保留率衡量时；然而，这些发现因分析过程中采用的技术、子样本和代理而异。