We use an RCT to evaluate the impact of a gender and business training for female clients of a microfinance institution in northern Vietnam, and consider the impact on business knowledge, practices and outcomes, as well as firm entry and exit decisions. In addition, we vary the nature of the intervention by inviting husbands to participate in the trainings for a subsample of the treated centers. To gauge both short and medium-term effects, we combine data from two separate post-interventions surveys. We find evidence of economically substantive impacts on knowledge, practices and outcomes, and on the extensive margin (entry and exit). We also document that it takes time for the "downstream" outcomes of the trainings to materializewhile we find evidence of medium-term effects, no such evidence exists for the short-term. Inviting husbands to participate in the trainings does not affect any of our knowledge or practice measures, but we document weak evidence for differential impact on profits.

Across the world the Gender and Entrepreneurship Together (GET Ahead) training originally developed by the International Labour Organization has been implemented to improve business outcomes and enhance women's empowerment. This randomized controlled trial is the first rigorous attempt to examine the impact of the GET Ahead training on women's empowerment. We focus on the impact of offering this training to female microfinance borrowers of TYM, the largest microfinance organization in North Vietnam. A major contribution of this study is that it focuses on different dimensions of women's empowerment: (1) personal empowerment, measured by control beliefs, and (2) relational empowerment, measured by relational friction and intra-household decision making power.This study also stands out in that we explicitly study whether involving husbands affects the impact of the training. We find that the GET Ahead training improves women's empowerment on all three aspects: increased control beliefs and intra-household decision making power (only on larger expenditures), and decreased relational friction. However, in general, we find no additional impacts of inviting husbands to the training. Finally, our results suggest that it takes some time before the training starts to improve women's empowerment. We observe no short-term but only mid-term effects from before the training to 12 months after the training.

This article examines the impact of microfinance 'plus' (i.e. coordinated combination of financial and nonfinancial services) on the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Using a global data set of MFIs in 77 countries, we find that the provision of nonfinancial services does not harm nor improve MFIs' financial sustainability and efficiency. The results however suggest that the provision of social services is associated with improved loan quality and greater depth of outreach.

During detachment of a viscous fluid extruded from a nozzle a filament linking the droplet to the latter is formed. Under the effect of surface tension the filament thins until pinch off and final detachment of the droplet. In this paper we study the effect of the presence of individual particles trapped in the filament on the detachment dynamics using granular suspensions of small volume fractions (φ < 6%). We show that even a single particle strongly modifies the detachment dynamics. The particle perturbs the thinning of the thread and a large droplet of fluid around the particle is formed. This perturbation leads to an acceleration of the detachment of the droplet compared to the detachment observed for a pure fluid. We quantify this acceleration for single particles of different sizes and link it to similar observations for suspensions of small volume fractions. Our study also gives more insight into particulate effects on detachment of more dense suspensions and allows to explain the accelerated detachment close to final pinch off observed previously .