Optimal teachable moments : a financial training randomized field experiment on clients of the microcredit program at IIMC. Evidence from India

Microcredit strategies amalgamate the concept of business, developing approaches to educate from experience and mainly focused at improving economic condition, especially amongst women. Microcredit financing to be powerful requires intensive actions to educate people trapped within poverty and to help them to get out of the financial confinement, which would lead to their empowerment. An empirical analysis is carried out based on knowledge from questionnaires for different sample sizes in the East Indian state of Kolkata using a quasi-experimental sampling design. An estimation of a general version is to be carried out using suitable techniques to treat the variables in order to evaluate the impact of education in micro financing. The activity of creating a comparison between the impact of financial education on a group of women suffering from financial confinement resulting in bettering their economic situation to that of a group of women without any previous opportunity to gain financial literacy which may or may not lead to liberation from financial confinement is challenging. There are two main parameters to be observed in this case which are the impact of financial literacy and the ability of the sample (women). This is determined by using the technique of a 2-Parameter-IRT model, which concentrates mainly on analysing dichotomous responses that have a single latent trait.