With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global poverty is our greatest moral challenge. The large and pressing practical question is how best to...

Research on microcredit is now two decades old. There has been enormous progress in understanding both what microcredit does and how. Yet a lot of what we have learned has raised new and often quite fundamental questions about its nature: Is microcredit primarily about investment, consumption,...

Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field,...

This article uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. While both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other sources of credit),...

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) present the potential to deliver high quality education to a large number of students. But they suffer from low completion rates. This paper identifies disorganization as a factor behind failure to complete a MOOC. Students who enroll one day late are 17...

This article discusses the two leading views of history and political institutions. For some scholars, institutions are mainly products of historical logic, whereas for others, accidents, leaders, and decisions have a significant impact. We argue that although there is clear evidence that...

Economists have long been interested in the idea that there is a direct circular relation between poverty and low productivity, and not just one that is mediated by market failures, usually in asset markets. The nutrition-based efficiency wage model (Partha Dasgupta and Debraj Ray, 1987) is the...

This paper discusses the two leading views of history and political institutions. For some scholars, institutions are mainly products of historical logic, while for others, accidents, leaders, and decisions have a significant impact. Given the possibility that policy decisions indeed make a...