Ideas to action: independent research for global prosperity
Research
Innovative, independent, peer-reviewed. Explore the latest economic research and policy proposals from CGD’s global development experts.
WORKING PAPERS
April 11, 2024
POLICY PAPERS
April 15, 2024
CGD NOTES
April 08, 2024
WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
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Research
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...
CGD NOTES
January 25, 2007
U.S. aid to Africa soared during President Bush's first term, to more than twice the level of any previous administration. But the newly divided government--Democratic Congress, Republican White House--could mean a cut in aid. In this CGD Note senior fellow Todd Moss uses just-released data from t...
DATA SETS
January 11, 2007
CGD working paper 32, "The Anarchy of Numbers: Aid, Development, and Cross-country Empirics" submits seven aid-growth studies to robustness testing and finds that most are fragile. The data used in the paper are in Excel (data set) and Stata formats (4-year and 5-year aggregates). Full results are...