The controversial effects of microfinance on child schooling: A retrospective approach

Leonardo Becchetti and Pierluigi Conzo

No 173, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: Two crucial problems when research agencies or donors need to asses empirically the microfinance/children education nexus on already operating organizations are lack of availability of panel data and selection bias. We propose an original approach which tackles these problems by combining retrospective panel data, fixed effects and comparison between pre and post-treatment trends. The relative advantage of our approach vis-à-vis standard cross-sectional estimates (and even panels with just two observations repeated in time) is that it allows to analyse the progressive effects of microfinance on borrowers. With this respect our paper gives an answer to the widespread demand of impact methodologies required by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of existing institutions. We apply our approach to a sample of microfinance borrowers coming from two districts of Buenos Aires with different average income levels. By controlling for survivorship bias and heterogeneity in time invariant and time varying characteristics of respondents we find that years of credit history have a positive and significant effect on child schooling conditional to the borrower’s standard of living and distance from school.

Keywords: child schooling; microfinance; retrospective data; impact evaluation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 G20 I21 J22 J24 O12 O16 O18 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-mfd
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2010-173.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2010-173

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).