Purpose: Natural calamities impair agricultural households' ability to invest in their farms. Facilitating access to agricultural credit may assist farmers in the face of negative revenue shocks. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of agricultural credit on the agricultural input expenditure of disaster-affected farmers in Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approach: The study utilizes data on 2,519 disaster-affected farming households from Bangladesh's Household Income and Expenditure Study (HIES) 2016–2017, which employs a nationwide representative five-year interval survey. Further, propensity score matching (PSM) identification strategy is used to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (ATET), and Mahalanobis distance matching (MDM) is used for the robustness test. In addition, heterogeneous analysis has been conducted to explore the impact of agricultural credit on different types of farming households.Findings: The findings reveal that access to agricultural credit has a favorable and significant effect on farm input expenditure for disaster-affected farmers. Therefore, agricultural credit accessibility could be utilized as a policy tool to assist disaster-affected farmers in improving their investment capacity, and hence, agricultural output.Originality/value: This study, using a quasi-experimental design of access to agricultural credit on agricultural input expenditures of the disaster-affected farming households in coastal areas of Bangladesh to estimate the causal effect.

Slum dwellers often fail to expend enough on waste disposal to have a healthy life, and remittances provide funds for a household to expend on the betterment of life conditions. This paper examines the impact of remittances on total monthly waste disposal expenditures and the impact of better waste disposal on monthly health expenditures among slum households in Bangladesh. Propensity score matching was adopted as an identification strategy to reduce selection bias. In this study, remittance includes both remittances received from within and outside Bangladesh. Remittance receipt equals 1 if a household receives remittances from within and/or outside of Bangladesh. Our results show that remittances increase expenditures on waste disposal by 28.77% to 32.74% among slum households in Bangladesh. Waste disposal expenditure is considered as an indicator of better waste disposal. Furthermore, we find that better waste disposal reduces total outpatient expenditures. A reduction in outpatient expenditure indicates that waste disposal results in better health conditions for slum dwellers. The findings of this study can be connected to Sustainable Development Goal 11, which targets sustainable cities and communities and suggests that remittances are a bottom-up financial mechanism for improving waste disposal at the micro level to improve health status. Graphical abstract

Governments often have strong motivation to formalize ever-growing informal firms. However, whether formalization improves the earnings of small firms is a crucial policy question. Firms chose to be formal so the impact evaluation of formalization suffers for self-selection bias. This study aims at examining the impact of the impact of formalization on revenue and profit of informal small firms using Randomized Encouragement Design. Small firms in Malawi, one of the poorest countries, are considered as the units of analysis in the present study. This study uses dataset prepared by Campos et al. (2018) who conducted Randomized Control Trial to examine different ways to formalize small firms in Malawi. Campos et al. (2023) examined the impact of Offer for cost-free business registration, coupled with a bank account opening information session as one of the treatment variables and formalization as one of the outcome variables in their study. In contrast, this study considers the offer for cost-free business registration, coupled with a bank account opening information session as an instrumental variable and formalization as the treatment variable. The result shows that formalization significantly increases revenue and profit of small firms. Heterogeneous impact analysis suggests formalization helps only manufacturing farms to earn more.