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.

Human Capital Investment and the Gender Division of Labor in a Brawn-Based Economy.

We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males. The model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a Roy-economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially. Empirical evidence from rural Bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn.