“The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,” by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article “The Impact of Group-Based Credit...

The resource cost of operating the income tax system is large, totaling as much as seven to eight percent of revenue raised. One source of this cost is the system of itemized deductions, which can require extensive record keeping and calculation. This paper estimates the resource cost of...

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are...

“The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,” by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article “The Impact of Group-Based Credit...

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are...

Two econometric issues arise in the estimation of complete systems of producer or consumer demands when many non-negativity constraints are binding for a large share of observations, as frequently occurs with micro-level data. The first is computational. The econometric model is essentially an...

The impact of group-based credit programs on the nutritional status of children by gender in rural Bangladesh is evaluated. Lacking exclusion restrictions of the usual sort, the effect of credit program participation by gender of participant is identified by imposing a factor structure on the...