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MCC MONITOR ANALYSIS
January 29, 2007
This week the Millennium Challenge Corp. briefed staff-level representatives of its Board on plans to add two new indicators, for Natural Resources Management and Land Rights and Access, to the country eligibility criteria starting with the FY 2008. Expand and Enhance: A Proposal to Strengthen the M...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Microfinance is often viewed as a tool for empowering women. However, it is not clear that increasing a woman's share of household income also improves her status within the household. In this working paper, CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan and his co-authors examine whether access to individual...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Can one teach basic entrepreneurship skills? A growing number of microfinance organizations are trying, in the hopes of improving the livelihood of their clients and to further their mission of poverty alleviation. In this working paper, CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan and his co-author measur...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Microfinance is generally credited with helping to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of the poor. But as microfinance institutions move beyond entrepreneurial credit to offering consumer loans, many practitioners and policymakers are skeptical about "unproductive" lending. In this working pap...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Information asymmetries--which occur when one party to a transaction has more or better information than the other party--can cause inefficiency, over-investment, or poverty traps. Unfortunately, they are difficult to identify in practice. In this working paper, CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Policymakers often urge microfinance institutions to increase interest rates to eliminate reliance on subsidies. This makes sense if the poor will borrow regardless of interest rates: then micro lenders increase profitability without reducing the poor's access to credit. But there is little evidenc...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Group liability--wherein individuals are both borrowers and guarantors of other client's loans--is often described as the key innovation that led to the explosion of microcredit. It is thought to create incentives for peers to screen, monitor and enforce each other's loans. But some argue that grou...