David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog

You may know that when I began my inquiry into microfinance I found myself drawn into scrutinizing what were then the leading studies of the impact of microcredit. The strategy was to reproduce ("replicate") those studies on my own computer as well as I could. In 2009, I wrote a paper with Jonathan Morduch that built on his earlier work in this vein, and argued that the leading studies had not, after all, succeeded in measuring impacts.

[Note: A full response to Mark Pitt is now available.]

And so it continues: the scientific process, live on your screen.

No post on this blog will I write with less objectivity than this one. CGD and the Financial Access Initiative have just released a working paper by Jonathan Morduch and myself that critiques what have been the leading studies of whether microcredit reduces poverty. We recreate three well-known analyses of survey data collected in Bangladesh in the 1990s.

CGD just posted my new working paper that explains the theory and practice of Maximum Likelihood estimation of fully observed recursive mixed-process equation systems.