Re-Re-Reply to “The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence”

“The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,” by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article “The Impact of Group-Based Credit on Poor Households in Bangladesh: Does the Gender of Participants Matter?” that microcredit for women had significant, favorable effects on poverty reduction. This response paper refutes the claims of Roodman and Morduch that were not addressed in the earlier World Bank working paper of Pitt and Khandker (2012). This response paper, like the Pitt and Khandker (2012) paper and others that preceeded it, shows that many of the Roodman and Morduch claims are based on a flawed econometric understanding and a lack of due diligence in formulating and interpreting statistical models.