Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this article we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system...

International animal donation programs have become an increasingly popular way for people living in developed countries to transfer resources to families living in developing countries. We evaluate the impact of Heifer International’s dairy cow and meat goat donation programs in Rwanda. We...

Household investment in preventative health products is low in developing countries even though benefits from these products are very high. What interventions most effectively stimulate demand? In this paper, we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products in Kenya, Guatemala,...

Household investment in preventative health products is low in developing countries even though benefits from these products are very high. What interventions most effectively stimulate demand? In this paper, we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products in Kenya, Guatemala,...

Summary Rigorously estimating the effects of development programs is notoriously difficult. We present a methodology that borrows from "event studies" commonly used in the finance literature. In our RETRAFECT methodology, a retrospective panel dataset is created based on "fundamental" events in...

Summary We measure the extent to which social networks determine sources of credit from a survey of 465 households in western Guatemala. We estimate correlated, contextual, and endogenous effects of networks at the neighborhood, church, and village levels, finding that church networks display...

What accounts for the discrepancy between microfinance impact claims of development practitioners and the far smaller impacts found in experimental studies? We demonstrate in a simple theoretical framework why “before-and-after” observations of practitioners overstate microfinance impacts...