There is growing evidence that appropriate financial services have substantial benefits for
consumers, especially women and poor adults. This paper provides an overview of financial …

Many people in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) work for Small and Medium-
sized Enterprises (SMEs). Oftentimes, these SMEs have limited access to finance …

We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how
technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the …

Although theory suggests that financial market imperfections–mainly information
asymmetries, market segmentation and transaction costs–prevent poor people from …

Many policies attempt to help extremely poor households build sustainable sources of
income. Although economic interventions have predominated historically,, psychosocial …

The use of statistical significance and p-values has become a matter of substantial
controversy in various fields using statistical methods. This has gone as far as some journals …

Mobile money, a service that allows monetary value to be stored on a mobile phone and
sent to other users via text messages, has been adopted by the vast majority of Kenyan …

Despite evidence from multiple randomized evaluations of microcredit, questions about
external validity have impeded consensus on the results. I jointly estimate the average effect …

This paper studies the long-run effects of a “big-push” program providing a large asset
transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these …

INTRODUCTION Working in six countries with an international consortium, we investigate
whether a multifaceted Graduation program can help the extreme poor establish sustainable …