I examine how microcredit affects growth and resilience. While credit can fuel growth and investment, it may also exposes borrowers to heightened risk, making its effect on resilience ambiguous. Focusing on Pakistan’s SUCCESS program, I leverage a loan eligibility threshold to show that credit access boosted loan uptake from 1% to 46% among eligible households, spurring a 22% increase in livestock. Yet, this came at the cost of reduced investment in housing quality, leading to greater flood damage and displacements. Exploiting the spatial variation in the intensity of 2022 floods in Pakistan, I find that within highly-flooded villages, loan-eligible households have 24% fewer livestock, deteriorating mental health, and higher rates of loan default after the floods. In contrast, loan-eligible households within low-flooded villages, continue to accumulate livestock, with a gap emerging between loan-eligible households in high- and low-flooded villages over time. These results suggest that in settings with incomplete financial markets, credit access could induce a tradeoff between growth and resilience.

We study the impact of a community-driven development (CDD) program targeting only women on social, political, and economic empowerment. Our intervention combines social mobilization and support packages for poor households. We randomized the treatment across 23 clusters of settlements and sampled 2290 households from 150 settlements. We find indication that the intervention might have increased information about local government for the whole sample and strong evidence for strengthened perceptions about political participation, as well as access to public goods for women who assume a leadership role. We can only identify such heterogeneous effects on self-selected female leaders because our control group also received treatment and selected leaders after the midline. We find no significant effects on intrahousehold decision-making, household’s economic well-being, and social cohesion.

This paper uses a survey of 15,000 households and 260 tutors to fully characterize 21 distinct education markets in Pakistan. Roughly 30% of students receive daily private tutoring, making it a major potential vehicle for scaling educational best practices. Moreover, most paid employment for women with secondary degrees in these markets was private tutoring—cultural constraints limit women’s work opportunities, and tutoring is one of the highest-paid activities women can perform from home. This has led to tutor markets where many suppliers offer group-based tutoring in their homes after school. However, follow-up surveys and pilot work show that, while the market may be pervasive, it is not always visible - parents are often unaware of alternative tutor options for their child. We are currently studying how addressing this information failure affects both the supply and demand sides of the tutor market.