Assessing microcredit programs by testing their contribution to the empowerment of borrowers has been widely advocated and explored in the literature on women and development. There is considerable debate on whether microcredit empowers or disempowers women, and there are attempts to reconcile...

Prior research has shown that auditors who learn superiors' views before making their own judgment are influenced by them (e.g., Peecher 1996; Tan et al. 1997; Cohen and Trompeter 1998; Brown et al. 1999; Wilks 2002). We use the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990, 1999) to examine the malleability of...