Case Study

You just got an internship with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Your boss, Nalina Canagarajah, has long been interested in microcredit programs and wants you to look at a specific case to examine the effects of microcredit programs. The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh is one of the best known and oldest microcredit providers and the data set Ms Canagarajah has provided you contains information about Grameen microcredit programs, participation, and household outcomes. The Grameen bank separates its programs into those for men and those for women. Some villages have no programs, some have only for men, some only for women, and some have both. Furthermore, only households with less than 50 decimals of land, equal to 0.5 acre, are officially eligible to participate in microcredit programs (the "target group").

The statistical analysis will be used for internal discussions of where future funding should be directed. Since you are only on a short internship, you will be gone when the decisions are made. Ms Canagarajah or any other employees involved in the discussions will therefore not be able to ask you what you did in the analyses and why. As such, it is imperative that your statistical analysis be clearly and completely documented. You must describe each step you take and why. Make sure you cover the base model before answering the questions. Methods and results of the analyses you do should be clearly explained and labeled in the appendix. Do NOT include the raw data.

The data are provided in a R data file. The data are a subset of the Bangladesh Household Survey 1998/1999, conducted jointly by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies and the World Bank. Information was collected at individual, household, and community levels. The variables and their definitions are listed on the last page.

To access the data, you should include the following line in your R script (requires an internet connection when you run the script):

load(url("https://www.dropbox.com/s/p6q5tl7ra5y1qva/micro_credit.rdata?raw=1"))