Mercados formal e informal de crédito en Mexico: Un estudio de caso

The coexistence of formal and informal suppliers of credit in a market generates the need of analyzing how those suppliers interact to satisfy the households’ demand of financial services. The objective of such analysis is the identification of an institutional design that allows the deepening of the financial sector. In this paper, we analyze the Mexican households’ participation in the formal and informal sectors of the credit market, with emphasis in the amount borrowed and income level. We use data from the 2004 Survey of savings, popular credit and micro-finances prepared by Banco del Ahorro Nacional y Servicios Financieros (BANSEFI). Our results indicate that the participation in the informal market is more frequent in households that borrow short amounts, while the participation in the formal market increases when households borrow large amounts. On the other hand, the participation in the formal market increases with the household’s income. Moreover, we find evidence that the formal and informal markets of credit are not perfect substitutes because there are households in the extremes of the income distribution that participate in both markets. There is also evidence of discriminatory behavior from the households in the sense that the probability of asking credit to the informal (formal) market is higher when the amount requested is lower (higher).