TY  - JOUR
AU  - Buera, Francisco J
AU  - Kaboski, Joseph P
AU  - Shin, Yongseok
TI  - Taking Stock of the Evidence on Micro-Financial Interventions
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22674
PY  - 2016
Y2  - September 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22674
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22674
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22674.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Francisco J. Buera
Department of Economics
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
Tel: 314/935-5648
E-Mail: fjbuera@wustl.edu

Joseph P. Kaboski
Department of Economics
University of Notre Dame
3039 Nanovic Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Tel: 574/631-9906
E-Mail: jkaboski@nd.edu

Yongseok Shin
Department of Economics
Washington University in St. Louis
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
Tel: 314/935-7138
Fax: 314/935-4156
E-Mail: yshin@wustl.edu
M1  - published as Francisco J. Buera, Joseph P. Kaboski, Yongseok Shin. "Taking Stock of the Evidence on Microfinancial Interventions," in Christopher B. Barrett, Michael R. Carter, and Jean-Paul Chavas, editors, "The Economics of Poverty Traps" University of Chicago Press (2019)

M3  - presented at "The Economics of Asset Accumulation and Poverty Traps", June 28-29, 2016
AB  - We review the empirical evidence on microfinance and asset grants to the ultra poor or microentrepreneurs, and assess our ability to account for this evidence using quantitative theory.  Properly executed, these interventions can help segments of the population increase their income and consumption, but neither the empirical micro nor quantitative macro literatures give much reason to believe that such interventions can lead to wide-scale, transformative impacts akin to escaping aggregate poverty traps.
ER  -