Microfinance plays an important role in the improvement of the livelihood of people especially in developing countries. The provision of microfinance services (such as micro loans, insurance, savings and technical assistance, among others) are considered as good measures for the reduction of poverty and levels of unemployment. The expansion of microfinance services has been accompanied with unp...

We provide a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impact of microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small businesses. We find that the redistributive impact of microfinance is stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the impact on aggregate output and capital is smaller in general equilibrium. Aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) incre...

Improved sanitation access is extremely low in rural Cambodia. Non-governmental organizations have helped build local supply side latrine markets to promote household latrine purchase and use, but households cite inability to pay as a key barrier to purchase. To examine the extent to which microfinance can be used to facilitate household investment in sanitation, we applied a twopronged assessm...

Microfinance is the provision of financial services for the poor. Health program through microfinance has the potential to address several access barriers to health. We report the design and baseline findings of a multi-site non-randomized evaluation of the effect of a health program on the members of two microfinance organizations from Karnataka and Gujarat states of India. Villages identified...

Microfinance has been heralded as an effective way to address imperfections in credit markets. From a theoretical perspective, however, the success of microfinance contracts has puzzling elements. In particular, the group-based mechanisms often employed are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion, although they can also reduce moral hazard and improve selection. We created an experimental econo...

Microfinance programs and institutions are increasingly important in development strategies but knowledge about their impacts is partial and contested. This paper reviews the methodological options for the impact assessment (IA) of microfinance. Following a discussion of the varying objectives of IA it examines the choice of conceptual frameworks and presents three paradigms of impact assessmen...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of microfinance and inflation in developing countries. Therefore, we introduce a moral hazard problem into a monetary search model with money and credit. We show how access to basic financial services affects households’ decisions to borrow, to save and to hold money balances. The group lending mechanism of the microfinance institution induces peer monito...

Table of Contents Foreword 1 1. Why use control groups in impact assessments of microfinance projects? 3 2. Biases of the control-group method and how to avoid them 7 2.1 Sample selection bias 7 2.2 Misspecification of underlying causal relationships 9 2.3 Motivational problems 10 3. Conclusions and recommendations 15 General recommendations 18 Recommendations for evaluators and donors 18 Recom...

this study attempts to examine the operational efficiency of thirty-two microfinance institutions in india. operational efficiency in microfinance institutions refers to how well microfinance institutions allocate the input resources. since the study is an exploratory nature, therefore, the data are collected from mix market on annual basis. it covers the seven-year period ranging from 2005-06 ...