This paper reviews the evaluation literature on policies and programmes designed to
promote women's livelihood capabilities across the life course to elicit lessons for the …

We use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south
India to highlight behavioral features of microcredit, a financial tool designed to reduce …

Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for
delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However …

Despite the growth of the sector, microfinance's academic research in developed countries
is still very limited. The paper builds on earlier works, which discuss four technical problems …

In response to the problems of high coordination costs among the poor, efforts are underway
in many countries to organize the poor through “self-help groups”(SHGs)—membership …

Microfinance groups are a prominent source of small-scale rural credit in many developing
countries. In India, evidence of the impact of the now ubiquitous women-only savings and …

Despite the popularity and the unique nature of women's self-help groups in India, evidence
on the economic impact of these groups is scant. On the basis of two rounds of surveys of …

As an intrinsic part of the classic microfinance model, group meetings are intended to
employ social capital to ensure timely repayment. Recent research suggests that more …

Despite widespread interest in the development of microfinance, spillover effects on the non-
using population and redistributive issues remain largely unexplored. I study a competition …

Group loans with joint liability are a distinguishing feature of many microfinance programs.
While such lending benefits millions of borrowers, major lending institutions acknowledge its …