Uncertainty and unpredictability faced by low-income households increase their vulnerability making poverty even more unbearable. India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)-initiated Self-Help Group (SHG) program, which is currently the largest and fastest growing...

The demand and supply of credit in the rural credit markets is investigated in this article using household data from India. The aim is to study the effects of household, farm productive characteristics and the policy variables on the demand and supply of credit. A type 3 Tobit model is...

Microfinance reduces vulnerability. We investigate if this impact varies by the delivery mechanism used. Correcting for the membership selection bias using Propensity Score Matching (PSM), the household's vulnerability is estimated using the Self-Help Group (SHG) microfinance programme data in...

We evaluate the impact of economic and non-economic factors on women’s empowerment of Self-Help Group (SHG) members. We estimate a structural equation model (SEM) and correct for ordinality in the data to account for the impact of the latent factors on women’s empowerment. Our SEM results...

The view that households are credit rationed by the formal sector, rests on the assumptions that all households have a positive demand for formal credit and it is a cheaper source for borrowing. To empirically verify formal credit rationing three different models are estimated in this paper. The...

The Indian match industry in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been characterized by child labour and a stagnant technology for over half a century. We investigate the technological changes and industrial restructuring, catalysed by the changing duty structure that has moved the match...

Rising urban poverty and food insecurity are serious concerns in developing countries today. Urban livelihoods and coping strategies remain poorly understood however. This paperexamines the response of female and male household members in marginalized urban (predominantly squatter) areas to the...

The provision of business training with microfinance leads to a positive impact on assets for the participating households. We correct for membership selection bias and account for potential training endogeneity with propensity score matching, using data from the Self Help Group microfinance...

We investigate the time investment in cognitive and non-cognitive childcare activities by parents with different educational attainment. In a second step we also investigate this effect for three different child age cohorts. Past research shows that the degree of success in the labour market is...

We evaluate the impact of training provided by facilitators of Self Help Groups (SHGs). This evaluation provides one of the first studies of the impact of 'microfinance plus', or the disbursement of services beyond credit. Indian SHGs are mainly NGO-formed microfinance groups but funded by...