Investigating the relationship between credit and self-employment projects using multilevel modeling (case study Mazandaran province)

Self-employment project was one of government approach to employment in agricultural sector. This project formed in different provinces using cheap credit because one of serious problems of agricultural sector is the lack of credit. Multilevel modeling is an important tools for data analysis that investigate the heteroscedasticity problem in different levels. In this paper regard to importance of considering this model in studies, the relationship between credit and self-employment projects studied using data on agricultural bank of Mazandaran province during the 2005- 2010, and multilevel logit model and software HLM7 . The results showed that there is a hierarchical structure in data. Also, Logit multilevel model estimation showed that there isn’t a significant relationship between the capacity of projects and credit facilities. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the feasibility studies and location measurement of the projects to achieve the objectives banks.