This paper examines the impact of micro-credit on employment. Household-level data was collected, following a quasi-experimental design, in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Three borrower groups are compared: Current borrowers; Pipeline borrowers and Non-borrowers. Pipeline borrowers are included to...

This paper examines a much overlooked link between credit markets and formalization: since access to bank credit typically requires compliance with tax and employment legislation, firms are more likely to incur such formalization costs once bank credit is more widely available at lower cost; if...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of easing credit constraints for rural producers in Mexico through loans provided by a national public development finance institution (DFI). In contrast to most of the existing literature, the study focuses on the effect of medium-sized loans over a two-...

This paper studies how formal financial access affects network-based financial arrangements. We use a field experiment that granted access to a savings account to a random subset of households in 19 Nepalese villages. Exploiting a unique panel dataset that follows all bilateral informal...

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms especially in their banking sectors that have been quite critical for both financial development and real economic activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant banking...

We conduct a clustered randomized controlled trial across 180 villages in Uttar Pradesh, India, to promote the take-up of a savings commitment product newly introduced to our study population. A random subset of participants was targeted through our promotional campaign to test whether the...

This paper examines a much overlooked link between credit markets and formalization: since access to bank credit typically requires compliance with tax and employment legislation, firms are more likely to incur such formalization costs once bank credit is more widely available at lower cost; if...

We provide new evidence about the degree of social segregation in England’s secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 rich industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), using...

In this paper we compare the new satisfaction evaluation approach, developed in the nineties by Oswald, Clark, Blanchflower and others with the older income evaluation (IEQ) approach, developed by Van Praag and Kapteyn in the seventies of the previous century. We find that both approaches yield...

This paper asks which sub-groups of the population are affected by the payment of a small cash incentive to respond to a telephone survey. We find that an incentive improves response rates primarily amongst those individuals with the longest history of income support receipt. Importantly, these...