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.

Microfinance supports mainly informal activities that often have a low return and low market demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance observed at the participant level represents either income redistribution or short-run income generation from the microfinance intervention. This article examines the effects of microfinance on poverty reduction at both the participant and the aggregate levels using panel data from Bangladesh. The results suggest that access to microfinance contributes to poverty reduction, especially for female participants, and to overall poverty reduction at the village level. Microfinance thus helps not only poor participants but also the local economy. Bangladesh has been a pioneer in the microfinance movement since its inception in the early 1980s and today is home to the most extensive microfinance operations in the world. In Bangladesh and elsewhere around the world, microfinance operations support mainly the poor and women engaged in informal activities. Microfinance involves small-scale transactions in credit and savings designed to meet the needs of small-and medium-scale producers and businesses. Microfinance programs also offer skill-based training to augment productivity and organizational support and consciousness-raising training to empower the poor. But even though microfinance has been the focus of development and poverty reduction activities for decades, development practitioners still know relatively little about the extent of poverty reduction possible through microfinance activities. This article seeks to shed some light on the question by

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A rationale for public investment in rural roads is that households can better exploit agricultural and nonagricultural opportunities to employ labor and capital more efficiently. Significant knowledge gaps persist, however, as to how opportunities provided by roads actually filter back into household outcomes as well as distributional consequences. This study examines the impacts of two rural road-paving projects in Bangladesh using a new quasi-experimental household panel data set surveying project and control villages before and after program implementation. A household panel fixed-effects methodology controlling for initial area conditions is used to estimate the impact of paved roads on household and individual outcomes and account for potential bias in program placement at the village level. Rural road investments are found to reduce poverty significantly through higher agricultural production, lower input and transportation costs, and higher agricultural output prices at local village markets. Rural road development has also led to higher secondary schooling enrollment for boys and girls, as compared to primary school enrollment. We find that road investments have also benefited the poor, meaning the gains are significant for the poor and in some cases disproportionately higher than for the nonpoor. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..