The Diffusion of Microfinancedoi:10.7910/DVN/U3BIHXHarvard Dataverse2013-05-229Banerjee, Abhijit; Chandrasekhar, Arun G.; Duflo, Esther; Jackson, Matthew O., 2013, "The Diffusion of Microfinance", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/U3BIHX, Harvard Dataverse, V9The Diffusion of Microfinancedoi:10.7910/DVN/U3BIHXBanerjee, AbhijitChandrasekhar, Arun G.Duflo, EstherJackson, Matthew O.Harvard DataverseAbdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action LabBanerjee, AbhijitChandrasekhar, Arun G.Duflo, EstherJackson, Matthew O.2013-05-222013-05-22Social SciencesWe examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program, "the injection points". Microfinance participation is higher when the injection points have higher eigenvector centrality. We estimate structural models of diffusion that allow us to (i) determine the relative roles of basic information transmission versus other forms of peer influence, and (ii) distinguish information passing by participants and non-participants. We find that participants are significantly more likely to pass information on to friends and acquaintances than informed non-participants, but that information passing by non-participants is still substantial and significant, accounting for roughly a third of informedness and participation. We also find that, conditioned on being informed, an individual's decision is not significantly affected by the participation of her acquaintances.rural southern Karnataka<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0">CC0 1.0</a>Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, and Matthew O. Jackson. "The Diffusion of Microfinance" Science 26 July 2013: 341 (6144), 1236498.10.1126/science.1236498Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Esther Duflo, and Matthew O. Jackson. "The Diffusion of Microfinance" Science 26 July 2013: 341 (6144), 1236498.datav4.0.zipData, Code, Instrumentsapplication/zip