We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of...

“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...

Two econometric issues arise in the estimation of complete systems of producer or consumer demands when many non-negativity constraints are binding for a large share of observations, as frequently occurs with micro-level data. The first is computational. The econometric model is essentially an...

The impact of group-based credit programs on the nutritional status of children by gender in rural Bangladesh is evaluated. Lacking exclusion restrictions of the usual sort, the effect of credit program participation by gender of participant is identified by imposing a factor structure on the...