Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

Many children in developing countries grow up in unstimulating environments, leading to deficiencies in early years' developmental outcomes, particularly cognition and language. Interventions to improve parenting in the first 3 years of life have a clear impact on these outcomes, but the...

We use an RCT to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses....

In a recent paper, Anagol, Etang and Karlan (2013) consider the income generated by these owning a cow or a buffalo in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, India. The net profit generated ignoring labour costs, gives rise to a small positive rate of return. Once any reasonable estimate of labour...

We examine the effect of large cash transfers on the consumption of food by poor households in rural Mexico. The transfers represent 20% of household income on average, and yet, the budget share of food is unchanged following receipt of this money. This is an important puzzle to solve,...

In this paper we use an economic model to analyse data from a major social experiment, namely PROGRESA in Mexico, and to evaluate its impact on school participation. In the process we also show the usefulness of using experimental data to estimate a structural economic model. The evaluation...