JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Political Economy. 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.

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We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males. The model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a Roy-economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially. Empirical evidence from rural Bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn.