Essays on the impact of microcredit on women’s empowerment.

Abstract

This thesis consists of four studies exploring whether microcredit alleviates poverty and enhances women’s empowerment. The first three main chapters carefully replicate two influential studies in the field: Pitt and Khandker (1998) and Pitt, Khandker, and Cartwright (2006) and their respective replications, including Duvendack & Palmer-Jones (2012) and Roodman & Morduch (2014). These two studies have been controversial and have spawned several replications, which themselves have produced mixed results. My research attempts to reconcile the different findings from these studies. After conducting an in-depth replication of these studies, my last main chapter provides new evidence on the impact of microcredit on empowering women, using a nationally representative survey from Vietnam. The ultimate goal is to gain better understanding of the effect of microcredit on women’s empowerment in developing countries.

Overall, I find weak evidence that microcredit improves families’ well-being, especially women’s well-being. In addition, microcredit has the potential to improve women’s empowerment if loans are given to women, but the effects are small.