We’ve gotten a bit of track with the monthly links I like post. I’ll blame graduate school.

Ok, enough with the excuses, here are January’s top links (according to me).

12 Papers Development Practitioners Should Read

It would be a shame not to point to the six (!) field experiments on the effectiveness of microcredit published this past month in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (all open access, too! So no excuses!).

The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Ethiopia

The Impacts of Micrfinance: Evidence from Joint-Liability Lending in Mongolia

Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco

Microcredit Impacts: Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Bosnia and Heregovina

Summary: Does microcredit work? Well, it depends, but probably not as well as you thought. Quoting from the introduction written by Abhijeet Banerjee, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman, the most consistent finding across all six studies is the “lack of evidence of transformative effects on the average borrower”. As Justin Sandefur and Lant Pritchett point out there is quite a bit of heterogeneity in these studies and we should be careful what we infer from the results.

Worm Wars: A Review of the Reanalysis of Miguel and Kremer’s Deworming Study

Your Guide to Deflate-gate/Ballgazi-Related Statistical Analysis