Taking Stock of the Evidence on Micro-Financial Interventions

We review the empirical evidence on microfinance and asset grants to the ultra poor or microentrepreneurs, and assess our ability to account for this evidence using quantitative theory. Properly executed, these interventions can help segments of the population increase their income and consumption, but neither the empirical micro nor quantitative macro literatures give much reason to believe that such interventions can lead to wide-scale, transformative impacts akin to escaping aggregate poverty traps.