Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households’ dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that MFI competition reduces both the...

The existing studies report substantial improvements in educational mobility in post-reform India using intergenerational regression coefficient (IGRC) across age cohorts in a cross-section survey. In contrast, our estimates of sibling (SC) and intergenerational (IGC) correlations for the same...

We analyze the effects of land market restrictions on the rural labor market outcomes for women. The land restrictions can have a gender and age bias because of an ex-post asymmetry in migration costs arising from older women's comparative advantage in home goods production. For identification,...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage, labor supply to market oriented activities and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide the empirical work, it develops a general equilibrium model that underscores the role of...

This paper relaxes the single factor model of intergenerational educational mobility standard in the literature, and develops a research design to study the effects of parents' education and occupation on children's schooling. We use survey data from rural China that cover three generations and...

The existing theoretical analysis of microfinance focuses on the nature of the loan contract such as group liability. We draw attention to the role of missing or imperfect labor market in understanding some of the important `second generation' debates in microfinance. Our analysis helps explain...