Microfinance across the globe is being practiced as a tool to mitigate poverty and chiefly as an empowerment tool to uplift the downtrodden. The paper has uniquely established that Self Help Groups in India have been significantly successful in achieving the objective of economic development of...

Self-help Group is a small economically homogeneous and affinity group of rural poor which is voluntarily ready to contribute to a common fund to be lent to its members as per group decision, which works for group's solidarity, self group, awareness, social and economic empowerment through...

Evaluations of group savings and lending programs have largely focused on average impacts, rather than distributional impacts -- finding modest effects on long-term economic well-being. In this paper, we exploit the randomized roll-out of a self-help group lending program in rural Bihar, India...

Self-help groups, as it evident from research studies, are instrumental in creating awareness and socio-economic development of group members and their families. The groups are formed and run on democratic principles. Generally, homogeneous groups of the same socio-economic background are...

Empowerment of women is one of very important issue in developing countries. As women are integral part of society, her status and participation in decision making as well as economic activities is very low. Microfinance plays very important role in improving women decision making by...

Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

This paper summarizes the findings from the Self Sufficiency Project: a large scale social experiment that is being conducted in Canada to evaluate the effect of high-powered financial incentives for full time work among former welfare recipients. The experimental results confirm the importance...