PhD defence: Kartika Sari Juniwaty

On Tuesday 4 June Kartika Sari Juniwaty will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic, and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

In many parts of the world, people rely on micro and small enterprises (MSEs) as sources of income. Despite the apparent ease in establishing MSEs, ensuring the survival and growth of such enterprises is challenging. The lack of financial capital is frequently cited as the most important barrier to the development of MSEs.

In this regard, the establishment of microcredit in Bangladesh in the early 1970s has been seen as an important innovation in this area, because it requires the poor to have only social collateral to obtain a loan. Potential borrowers may then form a joint liability group in which they guarantee each other's loans. The presence of this group shifts the burden of screening and monitoring from the lender to the borrowers. Since then, millions of people around the world have accessed small loans using this type of scheme.

For at least some entrepreneurs, relaxation of the financial capital constraint may also need to be accompanied by increasing human capital, particularly the managerial skills needed for running the business and generating profits. Training and mentoring processes may be able to play an important role, although whether entrepreneurship can be actually taught remains debatable.

This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing eﬀort to strengthen MSEs by providing evidence of the mechanisms that may or may not work in relation to increasing human and ﬁnancial capital in these enterprises. In the ﬁrst paper, Juniwaty and co-authors compare the outcomes of training for diﬀerent types of instructors, namely professionals and credit oﬃcers, with the objective of ascertaining their eﬀects on training outcomes. The results show that the class with the professional instructor was clearly more successful than that with the credit officer. First, attendance was higher and the externally trained entrepreneurs considered the course to be more beneficial. Second, the externally trained entrepreneurs gained more business knowledge and reported a higher level of happiness with their overall situation.

In the second paper, Juniwaty and co-authors consider the eﬀect of diﬀerent gender compositions in microﬁnance groups, with the objective of better understanding the impact of gender on group performance. The data were collected by using a lab experiment. The results show that the gender composition is important for the functioning of groups in several respects.

In the third paper, Juniwaty analyzes whether a mobile phone text reminder can stimulate the timely repayment of loans. Ideally, borrowers would not forget the due date of their loans, but they may do so because of limited attention. In a field experiment in Indonesia, she randomly assigned one-third of the borrowers who could potentially miss their repayments into a control group, with the remaining two-thirds receiving an SMS reminder. The results show that a text reminder increases the proportion of borrowers who take an action on their loan before the due date.

The ﬁnal paper employs quite a diﬀerent setup in being a more descriptive analysis of the secondary data sources used in considering the formation of preferences important for the success of entrepreneurs. The results show that there is a positive correlation between several important preferences such as the trust, risk and time preferences of children and their parents.

The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public. Copies of the thesis will be available from: The Communications Office, NHH (presse@nhh.no/55959661).