Tag: Financial Lives of Poor Households

This paper studies the changes in balance sheet composition across both extensive and intensive margins during this decade, allowing for heterogenous effects of year and regional banking sector development by household occupation type.

MSME segment is mammoth and has very distinct and crucial subcategories. Responding to this heterogeneity can spur momentum across the entire sector

Access to suitable credit could enable growth-oriented nano-enterprises to invest in productive assets, adopt new technologies, smooth working capital cycles, and expand their scale of operations.

This paper argues that institutional stability and change in social protection policy in India are best explained through the explanatory power of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse. However, traditional institutionalist theories, whether rational choice, sociological, or historical, tend to underplay the role of ideas and discourse as drivers of institutional stability and change.

This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on the recently released NCAER-MFIN report, “Assessing the Effectiveness of Regulated Small Borrowing in India”. In this blog, we examine issues related to measurement and empirical strategy.

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on the recently released NCAER-MFIN report, “Assessing the Effectiveness of Regulated Small Borrowing in India”. In this blog, we turn to some of the broader claims advanced in the report regarding the wider benefits of microfinance and assess whether these claims hold up when situated in a broader empirical context.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on the recently released NCAER-MFIN report, “Assessing the Effectiveness of Regulated Small Borrowing in India” (March 2026).

This blog critically examines the concept of the “gender gap” in financial inclusion by distinguishing between unconditional differences and those that persist after controlling for socio-economic factors, using evidence from the Global Findex 2025 dataset

This blog is the second in our two-part series on nano-enterprises, building on the discussion introduced in Part 1.

This blog is the first in a two-part series on nano-enterprises, a segment that remains underrepresented in official statistics and policy discussions. It presents a descriptive overview of India’s unincorporated enterprises using evidence from ASUSE, laying the empirical foundation for subsequent analysis focused on nano-enterprises.