| Abstract: |
Expanding credit access in developing contexts could help some households
while harming others. Microcredit studies show different effects at different
quantiles of household profit, including some negative effects; yet these
findings also differ across studies. I develop new Bayesian hierarchical
models to aggregate the evidence on these distributional effects for
mixture-type outcomes such as household profit. Applying them to microcredit,
I find a precise zero effect from the fifth to seventy-fifth quantiles, and
uncertain yet large effects on the upper tails, particularly for households
with business experience. These quantile estimates are more reliable than
averages because the data are fat tailed. |