With a view toward improving the success of information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives in less developed countries in general and India in particular, this work seeks to uncover reasons for success and failure of ICT for development (ICT4D) initiatives. We drew on social networks...

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is the largest public works employment project in the world. Its most direct poverty reduction pathway is through boosting employment and income for the poor. How effectively this direct transfer mechanism reduces...

Are ostensibly demand-driven public works programs with high levels of safeguards nonetheless susceptible to political influence? This conjecture is investigated using expenditure data at the local level from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Focusing on one state where...

This paper proposes and implements a mixture model to account for the unobserved group heterogeneity when modeling repayment behavior in group lending. We discuss the model properties and identification. We estimate the model using a rich dataset from a group lending program in India. The...

Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate information asymmetries when delivering credit to the poor. This paper proposes an empirical method to address the potential omitted variable problem resulting from unobserved...