What accounts for the discrepancy between microfinance impact claims of development practitioners and the far smaller impacts found in experimental studies? We demonstrate in a simple theoretical framework why “before-and-after” observations of practitioners overstate microfinance impacts...

Summary Rigorously estimating the effects of development programs is notoriously difficult. We present a methodology that borrows from "event studies" commonly used in the finance literature. In our RETRAFECT methodology, a retrospective panel dataset is created based on "fundamental" events in...

Summary We measure the extent to which social networks determine sources of credit from a survey of 465 households in western Guatemala. We estimate correlated, contextual, and endogenous effects of networks at the neighborhood, church, and village levels, finding that church networks display...