Abstract

This paper studies the determinants of women's welfare outcome in microcredit programs. These determinants are in the form of different types of characteristics of women: their own characteristics (age, schooling etc) or the characteristics of the household or village they live in. Observed effects are often biased due to correlation between some explanatory variables and unobserved ability. As finding suitable instruments of the endogenous variables are often difficult, this study finds information about unobserved ability from the marriage market. It is found that incorporating estimates of women's unobserved characteristics alleviates the problem of endogeneity. Therefore, we gain a better and reliable understanding of women's performance in the microcredit programs by combining information from both marriage market and microcredit programs.

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