ABS'DtAC'l'For a country such as Bangladesh, a nested multinomial logit model is utilized to test whether female time allocation is inflexibly fixed by local customs and whether informal activity is an independent category in a woman's choice structure of work.The econometric analysis of cross-sectional women's time-use data from rural Bangladesh suggests that a woman's activity as an unpaid labor in a family enterprise is not a distinct category in her choice structure of work.The results support the alternative hypothesis, however, that women's time-use patterns are not exclusively fixed by the society, but are partially influenced by individual-, household-, and community-level economic constraints.

This paper estimates the impact of participation, by gender, in the Grameen Bank and two other group‐based micro credit programs in Bangladesh on labor supply, schooling, household expenditure, and assets. The empirical method uses a quasi‐experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village‐level heterogencity. We find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in Bangladesh when women are the program participants. For Example, annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs, compared with 11 taka for men.