“Did Yunus Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize: Microfinance or Macrofarce?”

In 2006, Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus’s key innovation was to create loan circles, usually of five women, who used social suasion to ensure high repayment rates and sustain their creditworthiness. This institutional structure helps resolve a number of information, incentive, and enforcement dilemmas that plague small banks catering to a large number of poor clients who lack credit histories. Enthusiasm for the Grameen model has far outdistanced rigorous analysis of its institutional and incentive features; likewise, valid benefit-cost or statistical studies of impacts are rare. Did Yunus and Grameen merit the Peace Prize?