Gunfight at the NOT OK Corral: Reply to "High Noon for Microfinance" by Duvendack and Palmer-Jones (Uncut version).
The paper "High Noon for Microfinance Impact Evaluations" by Duvendack and Palmer-Jones replicates the papers of Chemin (2008) and Pitt and Khandker (1998) that estimate the impact of microfinance in Bangladesh. My paper replicates the Duvendack and Palmer-Jones replication and finds so many serious errors in their code and misrepresentations of the methods described in their paper that I conclude that their results are spurious and provide no evidence about the validity of either the papers of Chemin or Pitt and Khandker or on the effectiveness of microfinance.
Brown University.
Mark M
MM
Pitt