This paper is a practical guide (a toolkit) for researchers, students and practitioners wishing
to introduce randomization as part of a research design in the field. It first covers the …

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 …

Microloans garnered from crowdfunding provide an important source of financial capital for
nascent entrepreneurs. Drawing on cognitive evaluation theory, we assess how linguistic …

There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of
projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of …

Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've
never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food …

Since its emergence in the 1970s, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-
profile policies to address poverty in developing and transition countries. It is beloved of rock …

Problems involving causal inference have dogged at the heels of statistics since its earliest
days. Correlation does not imply causation, and yet causal conclusions drawn from a …

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of nonsystematic
income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the …

Poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high. One possible
explanation is that they have low aspirations and form mental models of their future …

This paper examines the impact of digital inclusive finance (DIF) on the subsistence
consumption of rural households in China. We find that rural residents in areas with well …