The purpose of the study is to: (1) examine the degree to which women borrowers of the Grameen Bank are being empowered to participate in familial decision-making around the management of income and expenditures like food, children’s education, dowry and teenage marriages; and (…
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The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has pioneered a credit delivery system with a vision to bring banking services to poor villagers. It extends small collateral-free loans, known as microcredit (or microfinance in broader terms), to group of poor borrowers in order that they may eng…
The growth of microfinance over the past two decades has been nothing short of astounding. Fueled by a mixture of good intentions and the potential to earn profit the industry quickly became the development world's new silver bullet to end poverty as many microfinance institutio…
This dissertation applies recent econometric techniques using control functions to outstanding questions in the labor and development literatures. The first chapter estimates the Frisch elasticity of labor supply, which represents the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. Pr…
Microcredit has been considered one of the most significant innovations in the field of development in the last thirty years. It provides collateral free financial resources to the poor worldwide. It plays an important role in poverty eradication, socio-economic development, liv…
Microcredit programs are of great interest to economists and policymakers because of their potential for reducing poverty, particularly among women. The first chapter mainly investigates the effectiveness aspect of microcredit programs. Using program evaluation methods, we find …
In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a 70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, r…
From the perspectives of economic anthropology, feminist anthropology, and feminist theory, this applied anthropological study is an evaluation of a popular international development model targeting poor women. Based on the celebrated Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the so-called “m…
This thesis eschews an econometric approach to the analysis of microfinance initiatives in favour of a wider, political economy approach. It paints a picture of the international financial and socio-economic environment in which microfinance as a practice has developed since the…
The thesis tries to provide an answer to the puzzle of the existing rule of the Grameen Bank, namely the banning of kin members to be in the same group. By design, borrowers in the group-based microcredit program who are jointly liable for the repayment should possess incentives…
Indonesia has experienced a shift from authoritarianism to democracy since the late 1990s. After the severe economic crisis of 1997, which ultimately forced Soeharto to relinquish power, Indonesia embarked on a more liberal and participatory form of democracy. To overcome the ec…
Microfinance programs have become a globally accepted and acclaimed intervention against poverty. These group-based lending and savings programs are exclusively targeted at poor rural women, mostly in developing countries. This dissertation examines the puzzles surrounding why s…
The United States (US) has the highest level of poverty among adults and children of all industrialized nations worldwide. Microcredit was introduced in the 1970s in Bangladesh by economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus to provide low-income individuals (primarily women) no-collateral loan…
In this dissertation, I determine how factors outside a household's control affect the allocation of resources within a household. In particular, I examine the effects of the availability of potential spouses at the time of marriage in China, and the availability of credit in Ba…
This dissertation examines the effects of three major development initiatives in rural Bangladesh on marital sorting and female empowerment. The first chapter documents that a family planning and health services program intended to empower women through fertility control led to …
In Israel, charitable organizations called gemachs were established by Orthodox Jews based on the Judaic principle of gemilat chesed (loving kindness). These organizations offer services to the needy. This study focuses on "financial" gemachs that offer interest-free loans to de…
This thesis analyzes the rhetoric of Muhammad Yunus as an articulation of a new governing logic, one that reconstitutes the concept of poverty and binds the poor to the apparatus of global capitalism through a new logic of micro-enterprise. Working within a Foucauldian critical …
The challenging living conditions of many Senegalese families, and the absence of a providing spouse, have led women to covet new economic opportunities, such as microcredit loans. These loans offer Senegalese women the possibility to financially support their households and bec…
The green microcredit project in Bangladesh started with the focus of promoting environmental-friendly livelihood practices among the rural marginalized people whose livelihoods were dependent on the extraction of local natural resources. This research examined at the livelihood…