Chris Blattman

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Microcredit: What have we learned in the past two decades, and what do we need to know?

That is the subtitle of Abhijit Banerjee’s 2013 review article titled “Microcredit under the microscope“. Short, smart, and comprehensive.

One Response

  1. This bit from page 513 struck me as brilliantly provocative ->

    One worrying piece of evidence comes from the study mentioned above by Fafchamps et al. (2012). They find that in-kind grants are much more effective in increasing profits than cash grants, mainly because the in-kind grants ensure that the resource gets invested rather than spent on other things. This is not necessarily a reason to be concerned—after all, the household could have priorities that do not involve investing—but the authors show that an index of self-control ef- fectively predicts the profits from the cash treatment. Indeed, the profits of the people with the highest self-control who receive the cash grant are no different from the average effect of the grant in kind.

    We so need this study design replicated…

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