El impacto de los padres en la práctica de actividades físico-deportivas

Table 24 provides a detailed overview of the bank’s business loan portfolio during the observation period. While Panel A shows the number of disbursed loans by year for our three loan categories of agro, micro and SME loans and the number of rejected loans, Panel B displays the respective total volumes of the loans disbursed. The majority of loans in our sample are micro loans (75% in terms of numbers and 56% in terms of volume) with a loan size of up to 10,000 USD. However, when considering total loan volumes, it becomes clear that SME loans make up a sizable

part of the bank’s business loan portfolio with a share of 35%. Agro loans, which were introduced only quite recently, seem to play an increasingly important role in the bank’s lending business. Rejection rates were substantial in the beginning of the bank’s operations but have come down to less than 6% in 2009. One explanation is that the bank deals with more and more repeat clients over time so that it can assess their credit risk better due to reduced informational asymmetries. At the same time, (potential) borrowers might have become acquainted to the bank’s loan granting standards and have learnt to better self-assess whether their loan application will be successful or turned down (see Kirschenmann (2010) for borrower learning in repeated interactions with the same lender).

Table 24. Lending by year and loan type

This table reports statistics on the bank's loan portfolio for the full sample and the following subsamples: Agro: Loans intended for agricultural investments. Micro: Loans with loan amounts up to 10,000 USD (from 2008: also with amounts up to 20,000 USD). SME: Loans with loan amounts of more than 10,000 USD and up to 500,000 USD. Rejected: Loan applications that were turned down by the bank.

Panel A. Number of loans disbursed and rejected

Rejected Agro Micro SME Total

2002 80 104 184 2003 503 2,888 66 3,457 2004 860 3,583 154 4,597 2005 1,010 6,789 369 8,168 2006 1,363 16,561 739 18,663 2007 2,408 2,163 32,661 1,202 38,434 2008 3,086 10,105 41,349 1,523 56,063 2009 3,144 15,635 35,589 947 55,315 Total 12,454 27,903 139,524 5,000 184,881

Panel B. Volume of loans disbursed (USD)

Agro Micro SME Total

2002 115,535 115,535 2003 5,788,970 1,292,500 7,081,470 2004 6,597,272 3,828,095 10,425,367 2005 13,754,232 11,831,532 25,585,765 2006 32,239,557 28,260,126 60,499,683 2007 3,655,380 69,632,677 50,910,208 124,198,266 2008 22,266,514 125,173,771 81,594,199 229,014,584 2009 33,719,686 112,488,057 49,922,596 196,130,338 Total 59,641,579 365,770,172 227,639,257 653,051,008

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Since we observe both loan applications and actually granted loans we are able to establish the impact of the financial crisis on borrowers’ requests and the bank’s decision to approve or reject the loan application and to assess whether the three subgroups of loans are affected differently.

Figure 9. Loan applications and approvals for new vs. repeat borrowers

Figure 9A. Agro loans

Figure 9B. Micro loans

Figure 9C. SME loans

Figure 9 displays the number of loan applications and loan approvals during the period 2007 to 2009 for new vs. repeat borrowers in our three subsamples respectively. We focus the analysis on this time period because two major events that

may influence loan demand and supply decisions occurred in the meanwhile. Firstly, the financial crisis reached its peak with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008. This led not only to worldwide turmoil in financial markets but also attributed to the sharp decline in oil prices and therefore affected both the Azerbaijani economy and its banking sector. Secondly, although AccessBank’s financial performance was strong, it experienced delays in its refinancing pipeline especially during the second and third quarters of 2008 because the capital markets were not able to provide the necessary liquidity. Together with the strong portfolio growth, these unexpected refinancing difficulties forced the bank to introduce limits on lending and portfolio growth which was done in accordance with risk considerations.

Generally, while the first event may decrease loan applications as well as approvals, the second event should mainly influence the bank’s ability to meet given loan requests. However, the refinancing problems may also mirror themselves in the number of loan applications because of the particular marketing strategy of AccessBank (and similar micro banks). To attract new borrowers, the bank’s loan officers visit the surrounding potential clients and call their attention to the bank’s business. Otherwise, many potential borrowers would never learn that they are eligible for credit and how much they are actually able to take and repay. During the time of tight refinancing, the bank curtailed this active marketing of its products (e.g. loan officers were encouraged to take vacation) and therefore the number of loan applications may also decline due to the squeeze in the bank’s liquidity.

Figure 9 shows that loan applications and approvals develop differently for the three subgroups. Agro loan applications drop considerably between March and June 2008, especially for new agro borrowers. This is due to a combination of seasonal effects as agro clients’ income streams peak in spring and summer and stricter risk management due to the tightened refinancing situation which induced the bank to limit marginal (very small) lending that was often found not to be used for business enhancement in the past. Interestingly, loan applications of repeat borrowers decrease much less while they steadily increase for both new and repeat borrowers after this short period of retrenchment (Figure 9A). This is a first indication that the agricultural sector remained mostly unaffected by the financial crisis. Nevertheless, the bank’s refinancing difficulties and the subsequent introduction of tighter eligibility criteria during the second and third quarters of 2008 clearly affect agro

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lending because clients were obviously deterred from applying for loans. Loan approval rates (approved loans as a share of applied loans)56 slightly decrease during that period for the new borrowers but remain at a high level of more than 95% afterwards. Thus, while the bank obviously refrains from attracting new borrowers during the time of refinancing difficulties, it is still willing and able to meet most of the demand of those agro clients who actually request a loan.

For micro loans, we similarly observe a considerable decrease in loan applications in the second quarter of 2008 and another decrease following the failure of Lehman in autumn 2008 (Figure 9B). These findings suggest that both the bank’s liquidity squeeze, again via tighter risk management, as well as the general economic impacts of the Lehman failure affected micro borrowers’ credit availability. This is also confirmed by the clear downward trend in approval rates for micro loans after mid 2008. While approval rates for new micro loans are on average about 4 percentage points lower than for repeat micro loans, they particularly decrease during 2008, which may reflect that borrowers who were rejected at other banks turned to AccessBank and were denied a loan because they were the higher-risk borrowers.

Figure 9C reveals that the demand for new and repeat SME loans is more volatile; however there is also a clear decline in the number of loan applications after March 2008. For the repeat SME loans this decline is longer-lasting in comparison to the agro and micro loans indicating that the comparatively bigger firms in our sample are more seriously hit by the crisis. Since these firms are more likely to be internationally connected, they may have to cope with a larger and more persistent decrease in demand for their products. Agro and micro businesses, on the contrary, mostly produce subsistence goods and therefore remain better insulated from the effects of the financial and economic crisis. Furthermore, SME clients are more likely to finance fixed assets which are first to be postponed in times of crises while micro clients often take out working capital loans. Finally, with a decrease in housing prices in Azerbaijan, borrowing to finance real estate became less attractive. Considering the approval rates of SME loans, we observe a negative trend starting during the third quarter of 2008. Approval rates for SME loans decrease much more than for agro and micro loans from around 90% to 50% for new SME loans and from above 95% to 75% for repeat SME loans which seems to reflect the increased risk

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associated with SME loans. A further explanation may be that it is easier and cheaper for the bank to “save” a certain amount of liquidity by denying some SME loans in contrast to a large number of micro loans.

To sum up, Figure 9 suggests that both external events have an impact on the lending operations of AccessBank but that these effects vary for the three different types of loans. While credit availability for agro and micro borrowers decreases for a very short period due to the stricter risk management induced by the bank’s refinancing difficulties, credit availability for SME borrowers is tightened more persistently. For the latter not only reduced supply possibilities due to missing refinancing funds but also factors such as increased firm risk, especially after the Lehman failure, seem to play an important role.57 Thus, we do not find support for the conjecture that micro clients may be mostly affected by the crisis due to their high indebtedness from multiple (consumer) lenders. Moreover, the analysis of approval rates shows that previous bank relationships benefit borrowers by better credit availability and help to mitigate the negative crisis effects which is in line with the findings of Berg and Schrader (2009).

Additionally and importantly, Figure 9 establishes the different mechanisms by which the refinancing and the Lehman effect influence credit availability. The refinancing delays seem to mainly affect the number of loan applications and much less the probability of receiving a loan, whereas the Lehman effect is especially important for SME loans and to a lower extent for micro loans, driving down both loan applications and approval rates after September 2008. Therefore, the refinancing effect reveals itself on an aggregate level but the Lehman effect may also be observed on an individual level. As the structure of our dataset allows us to measure credit availability on an individual level, a crucial part of the following analysis will be concerned with the impact of the crisis (measured by the Lehman failure) on credit availability in the three subgroups of loans.