The crash of global financial markets in 2008 caused a ripple effect on economic demand and growth worldwide. Export-oriented economies were hit particularly hard, and many governments stepped in quickly with broad-ranging stimulus programs to lessen the effects on households of rising...

Competing theories increasingly support the positive role of social capital in small loan default costs of group lending; at the same time, potential group collusion may increase loan delinquencies. Findings from the available literature are mixed on the role of the various attributes of group...

"The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,"by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2011) 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 on Poor...

This paper proposes an estimator for the endogenous switching regression models with fixed effects. The estimator allows for endogenous selection and for conditional heteroscedasticity in the outcome equation. Applying the estimator to a dataset on the productivity in agriculture substantially...

Introduction -- Understanding seasonal hunger : key issues in a global perspective -- Seasonal poverty and hunger in Bangladesh : vulnerability of the northwest region -- Household vulnerability and coping strategies -- Effects of policies and programs : some preliminary findings -- The role of...