Microcredit programs provide a two-tiered approach to poverty alleviation: credit for the purchase of capital inputs in order to promote self-employment and noncredit services and incentives. These noncredit aspects may be an important component of the success of microcredit programs. However, because they are costly to deliver and their contribution to the success of the programs is difficult to measure, they may not be properly valued. This paper uses primary data on household participants and nonparticipants in Grameen Bank and two similar microcredit programs to measure the total and noncredit effects of microcredit program participation on productivity. The total effect is measured by estimating a profit equation and the noncredit effect by estimating the profit equation conditional on productive capital. Productive capital and program participation are treated as endogenous variables in the analysis. I find large positive effects of participation and the noncredit aspects of participation on self-employment profits.

Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our synthetic cohort-level models find that the Great Recession reduced average family wealth by 28.5 percent-nearly double the magnitude of previous pre-post mean descriptive estimates and double the magnitude of any previous recession since the 1980s. The housing market was only part of the story; all major wealth components fell as a result of the Great Recession.