“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...

The most-noted studies on the impact of microcredit on households are based on a survey fielded in Bangladesh in the 1990s. Contradictions among them have produced lasting controversy and confusion. Pitt and Khandker (PK, 1998) apply a quasi-experimental design to 1991–92 data; they conclude...

Clemens, Radelet, Bhavnani, and Bazzi (CRBB) argue that the most-cited cross-country studies of the impact of foreign aid can be reconciled if changed in certain ways. The shared finding is then, in the CRBB view, that more aid is followed on average by more growth. I exactly replicate the...