women and budget deficits if women have different economic preferences than men then female economic and political empowerment is likely to change economic policy and in turn perhaps macroeconomic outcomes in this paper we narrow the focus to fiscal policy and we investigate whether female enfranchisement affects government budget deficits in a difference in differences regression for swiss cantonal panel data we find that the inclusion of women in the electorate has reduced deficits by a statistically significant amount

does microfinance reduce rural poverty evidence based on household panel data from northern ethiopia evidence on the long term impacts of microfinance credit is scarce we use a unique four round panel dataset on farm households in northern ethiopia that had access to microfinance observed on two key poverty indicators household consumption and housing improvements fixed effects and random trend models are used to reduce potential selection biases due to time invariant unobserved heterogeneity and individual trends therein results show that borrowing indeed causally increased consumption and housing improvements a flexible specification that takes into account repeated borrowings also suggests that borrowing has cumulative long term effects on these outcomes implying that short term impact estimates may underestimate credit effects

women s suffrage political responsiveness and child survival in american history women s choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men this paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for american women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution consistent with standard models of electoral competition suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large sudden increases in local public health spending this growth in public health spending fueled large scale door to door hygiene campaigns and child mortality declined by 8 15 or 20 000 annual child deaths nationwide as cause specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions

the microfinance promise in the past decade microfinance programs have demonstrated that it is possible to lend to low income households while maintaining high repayment rates even without requiring collateral the programs promise a revolution in approaches to alleviating poverty and spreading financial services and millions of poor households are served globally a growing body of economic theory demonstrates how new contractual forms offer a key to microfinance success particularly the use of group lending contracts with joint liability for the most part however high repayment rates have not translated into profits and studies of impacts on poverty yield a mixed picture in describing emerging tensions the paper highlights the diversity of innovative mechanisms beyond group lending contracts the measurement of financial sustainability the estimation of economic and social impacts the costs and benefits of subsidization and the potential to reduce poverty through savings programs rather than just credit the promise of microfinance has pushed far ahead of the evidence and an agenda is put forward for addressing critical empirical gaps and sharpening the terms of policy discussion

why are informal loans still a big deal evidence from north east thailand abstractthis article examines the use and benefit of informal loans for different income groups of rural households in north east thailand using a difference in differences estimation approach which is later complemented by propensity score matching the article shows that different household groups profit from informal loans in different ways poor households increase their asset endowment and in particular farming assets whereas rich households food consumption rises especially if households borrow due to a shock by showing that informal loans serve different households for different purposes this article provides an explanation why they still play an important role

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

embeddedness cooperation and popular economy firms in the informal sector this paper is motivated by empirical observations on popular economy firms pefs in the informal sector of santiago de chile these are labor managed firms embedded in popular milieu where cooperation between their members plays a central role this paper develops a partial equilibrium microeconomic theory of pefs first it endogeneizes the level of cooperation between the workers second it develops a static and a dynamic model to analyze whether embeddedness influences the behavior of the pef embeddedness is assumed to be captured by three different characteristics suggested by the empirical observations most of them influence the employment and income levels in the pef

does microcredit increase household welfare in the absence of microinsurance summary this study answers the question does a combination of microcredit and microinsurance improve the wellbeing of low income households we examine this challenge through heckman sample selection instrumental variable and treatment effect models the findings indicate that households using microcredit in combination with microinsurance derive significant gains in terms of welfare improvement microcredit may be good but its benefit to the poor is enhanced and sustained if the poverty trapping risks are covered with microinsurance to this extent combining microcredit with microinsurance will empower the poor to make a sustainable exit from poverty

microfinance and home improvement using retrospective panel data to measure program effects on fundamental events 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 the history of surveyed households events that are discrete unforgettable and important to welfare we apply this methodology to examine home improvements among 1 672 households in guatemala india and ghana using village and country year level fixed effects we find the probability of a major housing improvement increases from 0 038 to 0 070 in the years subsequent to a first microfinance loan

workers savings and the right to manage most western capitalist institutions are islands of fascism in a sea of democracy but democracy can be introduced from the political to the economic sphere by re assigning the right to manage from capital owners to workers thereby creating a sector consisting of self managed firms such firms require external finance for efficiency this can be supplied via a new form of financial asset performance bonds to be held by wage earners investment funds reforms such as these could improve productivity and the quality of working life strengthen the role of markets and help to deal with the so called pensions crisis these reforms would threaten the interests of private capital owners and would therefore require decisive political action they can thus be differentiated sharply from voluntary enterprise level schemes for introducing profit sharing employee share ownership or industrial democracy

microfinance and poverty evidence using panel data from bangladesh micro finance supports mainly informal activities that often have low market demand it may be thus hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of micro finance in an economy with low economic growth is modest or nonexistent the observed borrower level poverty impact is then a result of income redistribution or short run income generation the author addresses these questions using household level panel data from bangladesh the findings confirm that micro finance benefits the poorest and has sustained impact in reducing poverty among program participants it also has positive spillover impact reducing poverty at the village level but the effect is more pronounced in reducing extreme rather than moderate poverty

optimal credit rationing in not for profit financial institutions we examine the dynamic optimization problem for not for profit financial institutions nfps that maximize consumer surplus not profits we characterize the optimal dynamic policy and find that it involves credit rationing interest rates set by mature nfps will typically be more favorable to customers than market rates as any surplus is distributed in the form of interest rate subsidies with credit rationing being required to prevent these subsidies from distorting loan volumes from their optimal levels rationing overcomes a fundamental problem in nfps it allows them to distribute the surplus without distorting the volume of activity from the efficient level

does self help group participation lead to asset creation summary we evaluate the effect of self help group participation on a long term impact parameter namely asset creation indian self help groups shgs are unique in that they are mainly ngo formed microfinance groups but later funded by commercial banks the results reveal that longer membership in shgs positively impacts asset creation robust to various asset specifications with longer participation in shgs members move away from pure agriculture as an income source toward other sources such as livestock income training by ngos positively impacts asset creation but the type of shg linkage per se has no effect

what do we know about the impact of microfinance the problems of statistical power and precision abstract we review all eight randomized control trial studies of microfinance published in peer reviewed journals the studies generally show no or minimal impact from providing microloans to clients and have led many researchers and policy makers to conclude that microfinance has been proven to have little or no positive impacts on people s lives we review these studies in detail and find four main results first we are able to replicate the results using the researcher s original data second we observe that while the results are generally insignificant at traditional levels most estimated coefficients are large third every one of the studies is underpowered to detect reasonable effect sizes often due to low take up of the financial product offered pooling the data from the studies together improves power for most outcomes but minimum detectable effect sizes are still large finally when we run analysis on a pooled sample we find a treatment effect on business profits business revenue and household assets significant at the 1 level we argue that existing research on the impact of microfinance is generally underpowered to identify impacts reliably and suggests that we still know very little about the impact of microfinance we end by discussing ways to improve future research

a retrospective impact evaluation of the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty alleviation pudhu vaazhvu project abstractcommunity based livelihood interventions which focus directly on increasing income and employment have become an increasingly important component of large scale poverty reduction programmes we evaluate the impact of a participatory livelihoods intervention the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty reduction pudhu vaazhvu project pvp using propensity score matching methods the paper explores the impact of pvp on its core goals of empowering women and the rural poor improving their economic welfare and facilitating public action we find significant effects of pvp on reducing the incidence of high cost debt and diversifying livelihoods we also find evidence of women s empowerment and increased political participation

developing agricultural markets in sub saharan africa organic cocoa in rural uganda abstract this article investigates the process of development in a traditional african export market focusing on a contract farming scheme for organic cocoa in rural uganda based on a repeated household survey we measure the impact of the scheme on the income of participants and the economic mechanisms behind these effects we find substantial benefits from the scheme driven primarily by the establishment of credible incentives for farmers to adopt technologies which improve cocoa quality there is also evidence of broader trends of market deepening and increased productivity probably due to positive spillovers

microfinance its impact outreach and sustainability summary this symposium brings together recent empirical contributions with respect to a number of related and highly relevant issues on the economics of microfinance in particular the contributions provide answers to the following two main questions 1 does microfinance have an impact on the social and economic situation of the poor in developing nations and 2 are microfinance institutions sustainable in the long term and is there a trade off between sustainability and outreach

membership and employment in an egalitarian cooperative economic models of the labour managed firm often stress inefficiencies and perverse behaviour in his seminal work ward 1958 considers a firm in which dividend not profit is maximized dividend is defined as value added net of fixed costs divided by the number of workers for the short run problem with the capital stock fixed ward shows that the usual demand signals would induce perverse responses i e contraction expansion when demand increases decreases workers will not move between firms to equate marginal products of labour and the dividend maximizing firm will respond to an increase in fixed cost by increasing the number of workers these results are disconcerting in that they cast doubt on product market stability due to downward sloping supply curves on the achievement of an efficient allocation of resources and on the formulation of consistent policy prescriptions in a labour managed economy ward s fundamental result that dividend maximization leads to a contraction expansion of the number of workers in the firm as output price increases decreases is remarkably robust it has its analogue in the multi product firm domar 1966 it is not eliminated when labour leisure considerations are introduced ireland and law 1981 and it applies to variations in expected price when uncertainty is introduced bonin 1980 however the appropriateness of modelling the producer cooperative as a firm in which the number of workers can be varied freely to maximize dividend has been criticized robinson 1967 and vanek 1969 argue that a true collective would not dismiss some of the brethren in exchange for small increments in the income of the remaining members interestingly this solidarity position can be supported by the individual self interest maximizing behaviour of a representative member bonin 1981

impact of microcredit on borrowers expenditures a fuzzy regression discontinuity design approach abstractthis article uses the data from 69 villages in bangladesh to estimate the effect of participation in microcredit programmes on household expenditures a regression discontinuity design rdd is used to identify the credit effect our results show heterogeneous treatment effect on different types of expenditures we show that access to credit reduces per capita expenditure on durable goods such as kitchen equipment furniture repair and maintenance of house and increases the expenditure on per school going child we also show insignificant impact of access to credit on non durable goods and health care recreation and gifts interestingly our results indicate a positive impact of microcredit on village level expenditures

can commercially oriented microfinance help meet the millennium development goals evidence from pakistan summary the current emphasis in the microfinance industry is a shift from donor funded to commercially sustainable operations this article evaluates the impact of access to microloans from the khushhali bank pakistan s first and largest microfinance bank which operates on commercial principles using primary data from a detailed household survey of nearly 3 000 borrower and non borrower households a difference in difference approach is used to test for the impact of access to loans once the results are disaggregated between rural and urban areas there is a positive impact in rural areas on food expenditure and on some social indicators such as the health of children and female empowerment these impacts are observed even in very poor households these findings suggest that commercially oriented microfinance and the millennium development goals are not incompatible given a supportive environment

impact of microfinance on schooling evidence from poor rural households in bolivia summary channels for the influence of microfinance programs on a rural household s demand for schooling are identified income growth risk management child labor demand gender empowerment and parent information within a random utility framework a model of household consumption investment in education and borrowing suggests determinants at the individual household and regional levels of the probability of schooling gaps using data from two surveys of households of clients of microfinance organizations in bolivia regression models examine determinants of schooling gaps inferences about otherwise positive microfinance impacts identify potential negative effects of increased child labor demand which challenge usual assumptions and pose dilemmas for policymakers

on the employment decision of a labour managed firm the conventional analysis of a variable membership labour co operative assumes that membership can be reduced if required to increase income per head see for example vanek 1970 this implies a highly inequitable treatment of those who are excluded compared with those who remain we prefer instead to consider a decision process suggested by steinherr and thisse 1979 which treats all members ex ante equitably we assume that a co operative first votes on whether to reduce membership or not and then allocates any resulting redundancies randomly in section ii we define a range of conditions in which a cooperative will not vote to reduce membership although contraction would raise income per head for those remaining since voters who face the possibility of exclusion will take this into account in section iii we present the implications of these results for the supply functions of the firm and show that supply depends on initial membership that supply curves may not be reversible and that they may contain discontinuities kinks and backward sloping segments even with a smooth underlying technology a more general conclusion to be drawn is that a satisfactory theory of labour managed firms should rest on an analysis of decision making procedures and not on the imputation of an arbitrary maximand to the firm as a whole

assessing the frontiers of ultrapoverty reduction evidence from challenging the frontiers of poverty reduction targeting the ultra poor an innovative program in bangladesh abstractthis article uses household panel data to provide robust evidence on the effects of brac s building resources across countries targeting the ultra poor tup program in bangladesh we use alternative treatment comparison pairs in addition to brac s own classification we exploit type 1 errors in assignment in brac s selection process to create a second treatment comparison pair this allows us to estimate the program effects on the target group not contaminated by mistargeting to address selection on unobservables we implement heteroskedasticity based identification and two recent estimators based on matching and propensity score reweighting the results show that participation had significant positive effects on food security clothing shoes livestock and cash savings but there is weak or no evidence of an impact on the number of household durables and assets and indicators of health and women s empowerment the effects on the poorest of the poor the target group may be different from

effectiveness of active labor market tools in conditional cash transfers programs evidence for argentina summary this paper examines the impact of the program seguro de capacitacion y empleo sce implemented to provide support in skills upgrading job seeking and job placement to eligible beneficiaries of the argentinian conditional cash transfer program plan jefes the sce is an example of a growing trend observed in latin america where labor activation components have been increasingly included into cash transfers programs to support beneficiaries in finding more stable income opportunities despite this growing trend not enough is known regarding the effectiveness of these components especially on job quality in this context this paper sheds light on whether the provision of a comprehensive package of active labor market measures contributes to a successful labor market integration of cash transfers beneficiaries taking advantage of the panel structure of the permanent household survey and exploiting the time variation in the assignment of the program as identification strategy we apply difference in difference estimators to measure the impact on a number of labor market indicators we find that the program affects positively the job quality of participants by increasing the probability of having a formal job and raising hourly wages moreover the intervention is associated with a lower probability of having a low paid job and working an excessive number of hours these effects are however not homogeneous across all groups of participants while the program is more successful among the younger beneficiaries it does not contribute to an improvement in the labor market conditions of female beneficiaries who in fact are the majority of sce participants our results suggest that reducing dependency on monetary transfers through programs such as the sce that are rich in activation components is beneficial for participants labor market trajectories and therefore it constitutes a satisfactory exit strategy to more universal cash transfer programs

remittances and financial inclusion evidence from el salvador this paper investigates the impact of remittances on financial inclusion this is an important issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion can have significant beneficial effects on households using household level survey data for el salvador the authors examine the impact of remittances on households use of savings and credit instruments from formal financial institutions they find that although remittances have a positive impact on financial inclusion by promoting the use of deposit accounts they do not have a significant and robust effect on the demand for and use of credit from formal institutions if anything by relaxing credit constraints remittances might reduce the need for external financing from financial institutions while at the same time increasing the demand for savings instruments

observing unobservables identifying information asymmetries with a consumer credit field experiment information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice we estimate the presence and importance of hidden information and hidden action problems in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology we randomized 58 000 direct mail offers to former clients of a major south african lender along three dimensions i an initial offer interest rate featured on a direct mail solicitation ii a contract interest rate that was revealed only after a borrower agreed to the initial offer rate and ii a dynamic repayment incentive that was also a surprise and extended preferential pricing on future loans to borrowers who remained in good standing these three randomizations combined with complete knowledge of the lender s information set permit identification of specific types of private information problems our setup distinguishes hidden information effects from selection on the offer rate via unobservable risk and anticipated effort from hidden action effects via moral hazard in effort induced by actual contract terms we find strong evidence of moral hazard and weaker evidence of hidden information problems a rough estimate suggests that perhaps 13 to 21 of default is due to moral hazard asymmetric information thus may help explain the prevalence of credit constraints even in a market that specializes in financing high risk borrowers

credit programmes for the poor and seasonality in rural bangladesh this article examines the effect of group based credit used to finance self employment by landless households in bangladesh on the seasonal pattern of household consumption and male and female labour supply this credit can help smooth seasonal consumption by financing new productive activities whose income flows and time demands do not seasonally covary with the income generated by existing agricultural activities the results based upon 1991 92 survey data strongly suggest that an important motivation for credit programme participation is the need to smooth the seasonal pattern of consumption and male labour supply it is only the extent of lean season consumption poverty that selects household into these programmes in addition the largest female and male effects of credit on household consumption are during the lean season

economic impact of a private sector micro financing scheme in south dakota while poverty rates on native american indian reservations are triple the us average small business incubation programs available elsewhere in the us scarcely exist on the native american indian reservations nairs our unique study tests the effects of the lakota fund lf a private sector small business development initiative on the pine ridge reservation in south dakota on the economic development of the nairs our objective is to determine whether the sba like programs loans training and consulting can improve economic conditions the 1980 2006 annual county level shannon co is treatment and todd co is control data are a natural experiment results indicate that the lf inception and duration significantly raised real per capita income rpci suggesting not only the success of the lf but support for the broader notion that privately funded small business initiatives can be used to support economic development of isolated impoverished groups within the us economy

the distributive consequences of social banking a microempirical analysis of the indian experience abstractthe governments of many developing economies have actively promoted the expansion of banks in rural areas believing that such investments are necessary to reduce poverty and existing levels of wealth inequality there is little evidence on whether such social banking programs succeed in their objectives this article uses the government of india s credit policies of the 1980s to test the effect of the two main components of the social banking program on households the spread of rural banks and required lending for agriculture government policies were stated in terms of district level outcomes and monitored using a district level database of banking statistics i use this same database merged with household data for this analysis the availability of the data that guided policy enables the use of policy rules as instruments to identify the effects of social banking i find that social banking had a larger effect on nonpoor households relative to poor defined in terms of wealth and land owne

output work hours and employment in the short run of a labour managed firm in its pure form the organisation of a labour managed firm lmf differs radically from that of a profit maximising firm pmf lmfs are found not only in yugoslavia many forms of producers cooperatives and employee owned firms appear in capitalist economies e g jones and svejnar i982 the theory of the lmf is also relevant to the economics of trade unions profit sharing codetermination and internal labour markets this is because where worker participation exists elements of the economic forces prevalent in an lmf can influence management policies on wages employment and investment it follows that by studying the lmf in relation to the pmf we may be better able to grasp the workings of more realistic firm organisations in which both labour and management vie over the division of firm specific rents from this perspective on the theory of the firm we examine the short run behaviour of the competitive lmf and in particular the tendency for output supply employment demand and work hours to differ from the neoclassical norm traditionally the short run analysis of the lmf has focused on its employment response to output price changes the theorem due to ward i958 and vanek i970 holds that an increase in output price causes paradoxically a reduction in employment and output if the lmf maximises per capita remuneration more recent work in which the lmf maximises the member s expected utility over layoff probabilities and remuneration demonstrates that the lmf s response to a higher output price is essentially to increase both output and employment e g steinherr and thisse i979 bonin i98i and miyazaki and neary i983a the key to this result is that these authors distinguish actual workforce which is variable in the short run from lmf membership size which is variable in the long run but fixed in the short run the precise features of this lmf short run behaviour also depend on the nature of the lmf s bankruptcy constraint which is largely determined by the lmf s access to capital markets in this line of analysis however authors have effectively assumed that work hours are institutionally fixed but variability in work hours or effort intensity can also be an important factor in the lmf s response to output price changes because a change in the lmf s output price immediately affects the member worker s per capita some of the basic results of this paper were originally reported in sections 7 8 of our july 1979 mimeographed paper which was read at the second international conference on the economics of worker s self management istanbul june i980 and also in seminars at berkeley british columbia bell labs cornell hitotsubashi kyoto osaka tokyo and toronto in i979 i980 we thank j bonin and the participants of the above conference and seminars for comments on earlier versions in writing the present version we especially benefited from the comments of anonymous referees p evans and t macurdy we are responsible for any remaining errors omissions and ambiguities a detailed computational appendix for our theorems and examples is available on request

village banking and maternal and child health evidence from ecuador and honduras abstract many microcredit institutions bundle credit with health education or other programs this paper reviews arguments on such tie ins and concludes that net benefits are possible but requires empirical testing quasi experimental data from project hope s health banks and credit only village banks are then examined the paper presents evidence that health practices do not improve automatically with greater wealth in honduras results show that health bank participation is robustly associated with reduced subsequent conditional child diarrhea probability but in no specification does credit only bank participation have this effect in ecuador results suggest a larger effect of credit only banks in both countries health bank participation significantly raises subsequent healthcare over credit only participation and at least reduces the tendency to switch from breast feeding to bottle feeding as income rises effects on expenditures are ambiguous there is no clear link between tie ins and bank performance

the effect of gender based returns to borrowing on intra household resource allocation in rural bangladesh summary income from rural microcredit borrowing can empower women and consequently lead to investments in children s education and health this article examines the effect of male and female self employment returns to borrowing in rural bangladesh on intra household resource allocation and decision making abilities and how these effects differ with different borrowing sources household expenditure patterns measure intra household allocation the results show that female borrowers are better able to allocate their income toward goods more valuable to them and make major household decisions when their income increases this serves as evidence of increased empowerment or bargaining power of rural women in bangladesh

internal bargaining labor contracts and a marshallian theory of the firm the theme of this paper is due to alfred marshall who states that nearly the whole income of a business may be regarded as a composite quasi rent divisible among different persons in the business by bargaining supplemented by custom and by notion of fairness and the division of quasi rents entails de facto some sort of profit loss sharing between almost every business and its employees principles of economics 8th ed book vi ch viii sec 10 pp 520 21 marshall emphasizes that a significant portion of composite quasi rent is derived from the organization of business and would be lost if employer employee connections were dissolved in this view bargaining can even be tacit insofar as there is an organizational basis which ensures agreement among the concerned parties consequently internal bargaining models of the firm may be applicable to the analysis of european style codetermination and japanese style labor management also as the relative bargaining strength between labor and management changes such a view of the firm admits as its extrema the organization of a labor managed firm lmf and the textbook case of a profit maximizing firm pmf masahiko aoki 1980 1982 and jan svejnar 1982 have recently explored models of an internal bargaining firm their analyses however consider the firm s long run behavior only under restricted circumstances without market uncertainty the relevance of the internal bargaining approach to profit sharing and labor management would be enhanced if we integrated the firm s short run wage employment policies with its long run plans for the rate of growth and capital labor substitutions this i do by underscoring the firm s organizational basis which is essentially a long term contractual association between workers and management i combine costas azariadis 1975 and martin baily s 1974 apparatus of labor contracting with efficient bargaining to investigate the effect of varying degrees of labor s bargaining power upon the firm s shortand long run policies under uncertainty these results are then contrasted with the empirical findings of collective bargaining for example richard freeman and james medoff 1981 conventional results of lmf models jaroslav vanek 1970 benjamin ward 1958 and the recent macroeconomic approaches to wage employment adjustments ian mcdonald and robert solow 1981

financial inclusion gender dimension and economic impact on poor households summary we examine the question in the context of gender dimension what is the evidence of the impact of the financial inclusion programs on poor households represented by women relative to that represented by men by constructing a good counterfactual and comparison group we employ the difference in difference estimator approach with panel least squares and generalized methods of moments using standard errors for a robust analysis we notice that income growth cagr net of inflation effect was 8 40 for women as against 3 97 for men indicating that the gender of participating poor undoubtedly affects the outcomes of these programs

savings and nutrition at low incomes while many development theorists assume saving propensities vary among different groups there has been limited theoretical justification for this view this paper analyzes two complementary theories stressing the effect on saving of physiological consequences of poor nutrition at low incomes one influence is on the probability of survival another is on workers productivity either effect means that the average propensity to save can rise with income issues considered include annuities exogenous changes in survival and efficiency implications for the efficiency wage theory of unemployment and distinctions between wage and nonwage income implications of nutritional effects for econometric specification of saving functions are stressed

the gender and intergenerational consequences of the demographic dividend an assessment of the micro and macrolinkages between the demographic transition and economic development the demographic transition changes the age composition of a population potentially affecting resource allocation at the household level and exerting general equilibrium effects at the aggregate level if age profiles of income consumption and savings were stable and estimable for the entire population they might imply how the demographic transition will affect national savings rates but there is little agreement on the impact of age composition these age profiles differ by gender and are affected by human capital investments whereas an existing micro simulation are estimated from samples of wage earners that are not distinguished by sex or schooling and make no effort to model family labor supply behavior or physical and human capital accumulation considering these shortcomings of assessments of the demographic dividend a case study based on household surveys and long run social experiments may be more informative matlab bangladesh extended a family planning and maternal and child health program to half the villages in the district in 1977 and recorded fertility in the program villages was 15 16 percent lower than in the control villages for two decades households in the program villages realized health and productivity gains that were concentrated among women survival and schooling increased among children and after 19 years household physical assets were 25 percent greater per adult than in the control villages these large gains in the wake of the program induced demographic transition suggest reasons for designing new labor market and microcredit policies to help women during the demographic transition invest in productive skills shift their time more efficiently from child care to home production self employment and wage labor and invest more in the human capital of their children

assessing the effect of microfinance on vulnerability and poverty among low income households we empirically investigate whether participation in the indian self help group shg microfinance programme has helped reduced poverty and household vulnerability using cross sectional shg rural household survey data the potential selection bias is eliminated by propensity score matching to estimate the average treatment on treated effect using nearest neighbour matching and a local linear regression algorithm we find that vulnerability in shg members is not significantly higher than in non shg members even though the shg members have a high incidence of poverty however vulnerability declines significantly for those that have been shg members for more than one year these results are found to be robust using sensitivity analysis and the rosenbaum bounds method

credit program participation and child schooling in rural malawi summary we evaluate the impact of agricultural credit program participation on children s school attendance in rural malawi our paired site sampling survey reveals that credit uptake decreased school attendance by young girl children this finding raises concerns that young girl children are exploited as child labor either at home or in the field when working adults become more involved in income generating activities financed by credit the data however do not show clear evidence for young girls staying at home to do household chores or working in the fields in households that obtained credit but instead find simultaneous occurrence between attending school and taking responsibilities for domestic chores by young children it would appear therefore that credit uptake delays the realization of this concurrence among young girl children and leads to delayed school enrollment

medium and long term participation in microcredit an evaluation using a new panel dataset from bangladesh the objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microcredit programs it utilises a new and large panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005 the data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers we employ different estimation strategies including triple difference and propensity score matching methods to control for selection bias the impact estimates indicate that the benefits from microcredit vary more than proportionately with the duration of participation in a program larger benefits are realized from longer term participation and that the benefits continue to accrue beyond departure from the program the findings indicate the need to observe longer periods of participation to provide a reliable basis for assessing the effectiveness of microcredit lending

microfinance and investment a comparison with bank and informal lending summary comparing the impact of different types of credit on households investment in bangladesh we find that loans from microfinance institutions are likely to be channeled toward non agricultural activities while both informal and bank lending are associated to a higher expenditure in agricultural inputs estimated effects are net of the differences in the amount borrowed interest rates and collateral results suggest that features which are specific to microfinance such as tight repayment schedules and land based eligibility rules may reduce the suitability of this source of funds for the farming sector

access to finance an unfinished agenda recent data compilations show that many poor and non poor people in many developing countries face a high degree of financial exclusion and high barriers in access to finance theory and empirical evidence point to the critical role that improved access to finance has in promoting growth and reducing income inequality an extensive literature shows the channels through which finance promotes enterprise growth and improves aggregate resource allocation there is less evidence at the household level however and on the effectiveness of policies to overcome financial exclusion the article summarizes recent efforts to measure and analyze the impact of access to finance and discusses the unfinished research agenda

assessing the welfare effects of microfinance in vietnam empirical results from a quasi experimental survey this article analyses the effects of ngo microfinance programmes on household welfare in vietnam data on 470 households across 25 villages were collected using a quasi experimental survey approach to overcome any self selection bias the sample was designed so that member households of microfinance programmes were compared with non member households with similar characteristics the analysis shows no significant effects of participation in ngo microfinance on household welfare proxied by income and consumption per adult equivalent

household bargaining and microfinance abstract this paper examines a household bargaining problem where one household member can use external finance to invest in an uncertain business project faced with limited income generating opportunities we show that the household member will consistently choose safe investment projects we also explain why other members of the household can be made worse off from investment even when aggregate household consumption is expected to rise in a dynamic version of the bargaining problem we study incentives for the household to contribute towards loan repayments and identify conditions under which the borrower will transfer control over her loan to her partner

policies and impact an analysis of village level microfinance institutions this paper uses variation in policies and institutional characteristics to evaluate the impacts of village level microfinance institutions in rural thailand to identify impacts we use policies related to the successful unsuccessful provision of services as exogenous variation in effective financial intermediation we find that institutions particularly those with good policies can promote asset growth consumption smoothing and occupational mobility and can decrease moneylender reliance specifically cash lending institutions production credit groups and especially women s groups are successful in providing intermediation and its benefits to members while buffalo banks and rice banks are not the policies identified as important to intermediation and benefits the provision of savings services especially pledged savings accounts emergency services and training and advice surprisingly much publicized policies such as joint liability default consequences or repayment frequency had no measured impacts jel 012 016

the social performance and distributional consequences of contract farming an equilibrium analysis of the arachide de bouche program in senegal abstract this paper is an empirical analysis of the impact of a contract farming program in senegal we examine the access of poorer community members to contracts and the effect of the program on the income of participants the program performs very well on both counts participants and nonparticipants are indistinguishable by wealth measures and farmers increase their income substantially by participating in the program we attribute the former to the program s mobilization of local information through its use of village intermediaries permitting the substitution of social collateral for physical collateral and making the program more accessible to the poor

how infrastructure and financial institutions affect rural income and poverty evidence from bangladesh the mechanisms by which the poor benefit from economic growth remain a topic of debate in development literature we address this issue in the context of rural bangladesh using a pooled dataset of three household panels between 1991 2001 expansion of irrigation paved roads electricity and access to formal and informal credit have through different veins led to higher rural farm and non farm incomes accounting for exogenous local agroclimatic endowments that explain a large part of the variation in the growth of infrastructure and credit programmes however this has not translated into substantial reductions in poverty for the poorest households

the impact of group based credit programs on poor households in bangladesh does the gender of participants matter this paper estimates the impact of participation by gender in the grameen bank and two other group based micro credit programs in bangladesh on labor supply schooling household expenditure and assets the empirical method uses a quasi experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village level heterogeneity we find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in bangladesh when women are the program participants for example annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs compared with 11 taka for men

health shocks and consumption smoothing in rural households does microcredit have a role to play abstract this paper estimates using a large panel data set from rural bangladesh the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households response to such shocks households appear to be fairly well insured against health shocks our results suggest that households sell livestock in response to health shocks and short term insurance is therefore attained at a significant long term cost however microcredit has a significant mitigating effect households that have access to microcredit do not need to sell livestock in order to insure consumption microcredit organizations and microcredit therefore have an insurance role to play an aspect that has not been analyzed previously

market structure and market value while the use of market models to determine the sources of economic profits is quite new at least two empirical studies considering the market structure and market value relation have appeared to date interestingly they conflict thomadakis 1977 found a close positive relation between the four firm concentration ratio and relative excess valuation measured as the difference between the market value of the firm and the book value of tangible assets all normalized by sales as a result thomadakis argued that industry concentration plays a role in the determination of excess profits from currently held assets and those expected from the firm s investment options p 185 in contrast lindenberg and ross 1981 reported no significant relation between concentration and tobin s q ratio measured as the ratio of the market value of the firm to the replacement cost of tangible assets this result disputes thomadakis s findings and a purely structuralist interpretation of economic profits according to lindenberg and ross market power may or may not be evident in highly concentrated markets since high q s can occur in concentrated or unconcentrated markets and conversely low q s indicating no significant market power can occur in markets that have high degrees of concentration p 28

commitment savings in informal banking markets abstract i study the provision of commitment savings by informal banks to sophisticated hyperbolic discounters since a consumer is subject to temptation in the period that he signs a contract banks might exploit his desire for instant gratification even as they help him to commit for the future without banking savings decisions and welfare are not monotonic in the degree of time inconsistency consequently commitment savings will lower welfare for moderately time inconsistent agents if loan contracts are enforceable pure commitment savings will disappear this will further lower welfare if the lender is a profit maximizing bank but raise welfare if the lender is a welfare maximizing ngo finally i consider the coexistence of a bank and ngo there will be zero takeup of ngo provided commitment savings if there is competition from a moneylender but the ngo s offer will raise the agent s reservation utility thus reducing the surplus that can be extracted by the moneylender

what makes small firms grow finance human capital technical assistance and the business environment in romania abstract although the development of a new private sector is generally considered crucial to economic transition there has been little empirical research on the determinants of start up firm growth this article analyzes panel data on 297 new small enterprises in romania with detailed annual information from the start up date through 2001 controlling for heterogeneity with a rich set of firm characteristics and firm fixed effects our panel regressions imply that access to external credit substantially increases both employment and sales growth entrepreneurial characteristics such as gender and education have weaker estimated effects neither technical assistance nor a wide variety of measures of the business environment contract enforcement property rights and corruption have any clear association with firm growth

empowering women with micro finance evidence from bangladesh abstract this article examines the effects of men s and women s participation in micro credit programs on various indicators of women s empowerment using data from a special survey carried out in rural bangladesh these credit programs are well suited to studying how gender specific resources alter intrahousehold allocations because they induce differential participation by gender through the requirement that only one adult member per household can participate in any micro credit program empowerment is formalized as an unobserved latent variable reflecting common components of qualitative responses to a large set of questions pertaining to women s autonomy and decision making power the empirical methods are attentive to various sources of endogeneity and the results are consistent with the view that women s participation in micro credit programs helps to increase women s empowerment the effects of male credit on women s empowerment were generally negative

halving global poverty the goal of central importance to this paper is to cut in half the proportion of people living below 1 a day from around 30 percent of the developing world s population in 1990 to 15 percent by 2015 based on population projections in 1990 this would correspond to around one billion people exiting poverty this paper begins by discussing poverty trends on a global scale where the poor are located in the world and how their numbers have been changing over time it then discusses the relationship of economic growth and income distribution to poverty reduction finally it suggests an evidence based agenda for poverty reduction in the developing world full text available at official url

workers enterprises are not perverse we give a simple direct proof that workers enterprises i e firms whose workers and partners coincide behave properly as price takers adjusting employment and the supply of output in the same direction as the relative price of the product thus belying the usual theory in which labor managed firms tend to curtail employment and output in their short run response to an increase in output price the logic of our proof derives again from the common sense of the worker partnership market in workers and incentives sertel 1982

microfinance with chinese characteristics abstract analyzing household survey data from three microfinance program sites we provide an early systematic assessment of chinese microfinance programs which have grown rapidly since 1994 are based on the grameen model and include an unprecedented large scale government initiative we examine the empirical propositions that underpin successful microfinance programs reaching the poor targeting financial and operational performance sustainability and program benefits impact we find that nongovernmental programs perform well in all three areas but that governmental programs perform poorly given the remote location and focus on agricultural projects in china s poor areas we advocate greater flexibility in loan contract terms especially repayment schedules

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

measuring microfinance assessing the conflict between practitioners and researchers with evidence from nepal summary 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 and why estimations in some recent randomized trials understate the average treatment effect on the treated att our empirical study uses a unique data set from eastern nepal to study the impact of microfinance in villages where microfinance did not previously exist we find that approximately three fourths of the apparent impact of microfinance observed by practitioners is an illusion driven by correlated unobservable factors

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

microenterprise lending to female entrepreneurs sacrificing economic growth for poverty alleviation abstract this research compares the performance of female and male entrepreneurs in a microenterprise credit program in guatemala previous research and field practice has suggested that targeting credit at female borrowers allows for greater increases in household welfare but that male entrepreneurs may more aggressively expand enterprises when given access to credit in this paper we develop a model that shows that increases in value of home time during childbearing years for women may substantially account for gender differences in responses to credit access empirical results from guatemalan survey data yield estimations consistent with the predictions from our model

the welfare impact of food pathogen vaccines abstract vaccines against several common foodborne pathogens are being developed and could substantially alter the policy tools available to address foodborne illness however little analysis is available to suggest how social welfare would be affected by consumer and industry responses to these new vaccines to address this void we use stated preference data to estimate consumer willingness to pay wtp for food safety vaccines and then simulate the welfare impacts of subsidizing consumer purchases of the vaccine given two different industry responses maintaining current levels of food safety vigilance and reducing food safety vigilance due to a moral hazard response that undermines consumer confidence in food safety to obtain consumer preferences for the vaccine we simultaneously estimate a three equation model that recognizes the recursive nature of responses to questions probing respondents willingness to purchase vaccines and perceptions of the probability and severity of possible foodborne illness incidents and the joint distribution of unobservable components our simulations show large consumer wtp if vaccines are relatively inexpensive while the presence of moral hazard increases respondents willingness to pay and voluntary uptake of vaccine

the impact of shocks on gender differentiated asset dynamics in bangladesh abstractthis study investigates changes in assets owned by the household head his spouse or jointly in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in bangladesh with household survey panel data looking at changes within households over time we find that weather shocks adversely affect the asset holdings of household heads relatively strongly while predicted negative shocks more strongly lead to assets of both spouses being drawn down the results furthermore suggest that jointly owned assets are not easily sold in response to shocks and that women s asset holdings and coping strategies are shaped by their lower involvement in agriculture

the theory of the labour managed firm revisited the voluntary interactive approach membership in the authors labor managed firm is determined in the long run by expected income maximization in the short run upon the realization of output price each member may leave the labor managed firm however a decision to leave when the entire membership quits is associated with fixed cost this arrangement ensures ex post egalitarianism and sense of job security the authors short run result is that employment does not exhibit a perverse response to price variations the long run result is that their labor managed firm is more populous than the illyrian firm and may even be more than its capitalistic twin copyright 1993 by royal economic society

the impact of microcredit borrowing on household consumption in bangladesh the rapid expansion of microcredit in recent years renders knowledge of its impact on poverty critical unfortunately empirical investigations have been limited by endogeneity issues and randomiz

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the benefits and costs of microfinance evidence from bangladesh abstract using the latest developments from the evaluation literature namely the technique of matching this paper shows a positive but lower than previously thought effect of microfinance on expenditure per capita supply of labour and level of school enrolment for boys and girls for instance participants spend 3 per cent more on average than non participants in control villages this paper also takes into account repayment delays to calculate the cost of credit provision it shows how a better investigation at the individual level of the benefits brought and the cost borne could help microfinance institutions to better select their customers jel classification c14 d10 g21 i38 o12 o16