Microcredit RCTs in development: miracle or mirage ?

Florent Bédécarrats, Isabelle Guérin and François Roubaud

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Microcredit has long stood as a flagship topic for RCTs in development, starting with the publication of a special issue in a leading economics journal on six RCTs conducted in different world regions. This special issue was hailed as the first rigorous and conceivably definitive study on the impacts of microcredit. However, a detailed exploration of the implementation of these six RCTs reveals many limitations with respect to internal and external validity, ethics and interpretation. This paper uses analytical tools from statistics, political economy and development anthropology to discuss the extent to which the entire RCT chain strays from the ideal RCT principles (from sampling, data collection, data entry and recoding, estimates and interpretation to publication and dissemination of results). It also raises questions about the disparity between the academic and political success of this special issue and the many inconsistencies of method.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in 2019, 39 p. multigr

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Microcredit RCTs in Development: Miracle or Mirage? (2019)
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:hal:journl:hal-02496236

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().