Recently, microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified it, such as Pitt and Khandker. Chemin applied propensity score matching to the Pitt and Khandker data, finding different impacts, but does not disaggregate by...

Banerjee and Iyer find that districts which the British assigned to landlord revenue systems systematically underperform districts with non-landlord based revenue systems in agricultural performance, after the onset of the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s. Based on colonial documents, archival...

Development economics has become increasingly quantified in recent years, reflecting the aspirations of economists to practise hard science. We argue that standard applied econometric methodology lacks one key feature of the claim of science to be scientific, namely replication as part of...

This article explores the role of agro-ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in India. Using a new operationalisation of agro-ecological factors and incorporating within-State variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and...

Many studies of development interventions are individually unable to provide convincing conclusions because of low statistical significance, small size, limited geographical purview and so forth. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are forms of research synthesis that combine studies of...

Systematic reviews and meta-analysis have risen in popularity in international development to provide evidence on 'what works'. This paper reports the findings of a meta-analysis to assess the impact of microcredit on women's control over household spending to illustrate the challenges of...

Recently, microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified the microfinance phenomenon. This paper applies propensity score matching (PSM), which has become widely used for the analysis of observational data, to the study...