This paper examines a cost-reducing innovation to the delivery of "Self-Help Group" microfinance services. These groups …

-based lending product in a new market. In 2005, half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of a branch … of a particular microfinance institution (Spandana) while the remainder were not, although other MFIs were free to enter …. We found no changes in any of the development outcomes that are often believed to be affected by microfinance, including …

Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate … estimate the model using a rich dataset from a group lending program in India. The estimation results support our model …

of microfinance. Random variation in the frequency of mandatory meetings across first-time borrower groups generates …

In October 2010, the state government of Andhra Pradesh, India issued an emergency ordinance, bringing microfinance … loans in the affected state. We use this massive dislocation in the microfinance market to identify the causal impacts of a … sector (agriculture), suggesting that one important impact of the microfinance contraction was transmitted through its effect …

Recent evaluations of traditional microfinance loans have found no significant impacts on borrower incomes or …

, India, we find that “gung ho entrepreneurs” (GEs), households who were already running a business before microfinance …

aggregate household saving rates in Japan, China, and India. The observed age distributions help explain the contrasting saving … saving rates, while decreasing family size increases saving for both China and India. Projecting forward, the model predicts …