In poor countries, over a quarter of children under the age of five years are nalnourished. The corresponding rate in rich countries is below 3%. Unfortunately, being undernourished as a child is associated with worse economic outcomes as an adult, largely a result of worse adult health. Thus,...

State-led credit and savings programs have been implemented in numerous low income countries, but their success in reaching the poor remains widely debated. We report on research which exploits the policy features of the Indian social banking program to provide evidence on this issue

Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason for why poor people remain poor. This Paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion programme to provide empirical evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian central bank mandated that a commercial bank could open a...

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and infuence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program were directly deposited into...