This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group-lending microcredit program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in takeup of microcredit. Small business investment and profits of preexisting...

We use an RCT to analyze the impacts of microcredit. The study population consists of loan applicants who were marginally rejected by an MFI in Bosnia. A random subset of these were offered a loan. We provide evidence of higher self-employment, increases in inventory, a reduction in the...

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages did. Among households identified as more likely to borrow, microcredit access...

We present evidence from a randomized field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women. We find a positive impact of access to group loans on female entrepreneurship and household food consumption but not on total working...

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the largest microlender in Mexico. We find no evidence of transformative impacts on 37 outcomes (although some estimates have...

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal effects of...

We use data from a randomized controlled trial conducted in 2003-2006 in rural Amhara and Oromiya (Ethiopia) to study the impacts of increasing access to microfinance on a number of socioeconomic outcomes, including income from agriculture, animal husbandry, nonfarm self-employment, labor...

Information asymmetries are prominent in theory but difficult to estimate. This paper exploits discontinuities in loan eligibility to test for moral hazard and adverse selection in the payday loan market. Regression discontinuity and regression kink approaches suggest that payday borrowers are...

Micro-entrepreneurs often lack the financial literacy required to make important financial decisions. We conducted a randomized evaluation with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct programs: standard accounting training versus a simplified, rule-of-thumb...

In 1993, the Indian government introduced debt recovery tribunals to speed up the resolution of debt recovery claims larger than a threshold. This paper exploits the staggered introduction of tribunals across states and the link between overdues and claim size to implement a...