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Data: Evaluation of the impact of microfinance in rural areas of Morocco
Microcredit has rapidly expanded in the past years, providing access to financial services to a large population previously excluded from the financial system. However, whether it helps the poor has been a subject of intense debate on which, until very recently, there was no rigorous evidence. This paper reports the results of a randomized experiment designed to measure the...
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Data: Long-run effects of repayment flexibility in microfinance: Evidence from India
Financiers across the world structure debt contracts to limit the risk of entrepreneurial lending. But debt structures that reduce risk may inhibit enterprise growth, especially among the poor. Using a field experiment we quantify the short- and long-run tradeoffs associated with the classic microfinance debt contract. We contrast the classic contract which requires that...
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Data: The agricultural productivity gap in developing countries
According to national accounts data for developing countries, value added per worker is on average four times higher in the non-agriculture sector than in agriculture. Taken at face value this “agricultural productivity gap” suggests that labor is greatly misallocated across sectors in the developing world. In this paper we draw on new micro evidence to ask to what...
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Data: Developing and analysing firm-level moments on productivity and reallocation
This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonised firm-level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross-country variation in the within-industry covariance between size and productivity. We develop a model in which heterogeneous firms face adjustment...
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Enabling microenterprise development in Sub-Saharan Africa through the provision of financial services
Most people in rural Africa do not have bank accounts. In this paper, we combine experimental and survey evidence from Western Kenya to document some of the supply and demand factors behind such low levels of financial inclusion. Our experiment had two parts. In the first part, we waived the fixed cost of opening a basic savings account at a local bank for a random subset...
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Data: Potato traders in West Bengal: A survey of contractual relations and market structure
Our study consists of a pilot survey of a random sub-set of phorias (middlemen) and larger traders who operate in 72 villages of West Medinipur and Hugli districts and their corresponding potato markets. Our goal is to understand the nature of contractual relations between farmers and phorias on the one hand, and between phorias and wholesale traders that they sell to on...
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Data: Household finance in India
We employ loan-level data on over a million loans disbursed in India between 1995 and 2010 to understand how fast-changing regulation impacted mortgage lending and risk. Our paper uses changes in regulatory treatment discontinuities associated with loan size and leverage to detect regulation-induced loan delinquencies. We also find that an acceleration in the classification...
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Data: Social networks, phone money transfers, and rainfall shocks: evidence from Rwanda
A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks are likely to be less effective. In this paper, we document how a new technology...
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Data: Sugar mills: Ownership, productivity and crop choice
An old theoretical and empirical literature has struggled with how ownership structure affects economic outcomes. We seek to answer this question by examining the effect that different ownership structures have on the outcomes of sugarcane farmers in India. The econometric strategy exploits the zoning system - whereby farmers living within a zone are forced to sell sugar to...
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Data: Training productivity, and upgrading: Pilot of evaluation of female and supervisor training programs in the Bangladesh apparel sector
We marketed a training program for lower level managers (line supervisors) to large factories in the Bangladeshi ready-made garment industry. Take-up of the program (even for a free slot) was low, due to intense production pressures, fire-fighting and concerns over retention of trained workers. Take-up is quite insensitive to pricing. There was higher interest and demand in...