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Displaying all posts by Jonathan Morduch
June 18, 2013
The Other Half of the Benefit-Cost Debate
When it comes to costs and benefits, we at FAI tend to focus on benefits. The recent release of the Compartamos microfinance impact evaluation was thus a big event in our office. With our heads in the academic literature, we tend to write a lot about RCTs and other ways to measure benefits of interventions.
April 22, 2013
What is the Impact of Muhammad Yunus?
Muhammad Yunus spoke to an overflowing crowd at NYU on April 15, an event jointly sponsored by the Wagner School of Public Service, Stern School of Business, and Financial Access Initiative.
March 25, 2013
A Revolution at Home
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist:
February 20, 2013
What’s Next? External Validity
What’s next? Jonathan Morduch says: Making RCTs more useful.
When you’re thirsty, that first gulp of water is really satisfying. But after months of just drinking water, you’ll likely start hoping for more from your beverages.
I think that’s where we are with RCTs of microfinance.
December 13, 2012
Albert Hirschman, 1915-2012
Albert Hirschman died on Monday. He was one of the most creative and broad-ranging development economists of the past fifty years.
The Findex project helps to correct a long-standing imbalance in evidence on global finance: an abundance of data on the supply of financial services but curiously little that’s systematic and comparative about global demand.
April 5, 2012
What should regulators do?
There’s not enough academic research on the regulation of financial inclusion. Many of the questions might seem too applied for some researchminded economists, but that leaves regulators with few guideposts. It also seems short-sighted.
Regulators hope that expanding financial access will also provide greater stability to the overall financial system. This would occur as the market becomes larger and more diverse, and thus better able to withstand difficulties in any particular corner. The range of depositors would enlarge, as would the kinds of financial institutions in the market. Greater competition among providers would create pressure for quality competition.
March 27, 2012
Can the expansion of microfinance add up to macro impacts?
The most basic question is the micro one: whether microfinance typically yields notable impacts on the lives of low-income families. The logical follow-on is, to the extent that micro impacts emerge, how do those impacts
add up? Is there a reasonable case that expanding microfinance can make a dent in regional or national economic growth rates? In national-level poverty rates?
December 15, 2011
Can the expansion of microfinance add up to macro impacts?
High quality evidence on the state of financial access around the world is advancing rapidly. A happy consequence of increasing knowledge is the ability to better recognize what we don’t yet know. That's why FAI launched a series on the ten questions, some micro, some macro, that need answers if we are to make informed decisions on how to improve financial access.This is the seventh installment of the 10 Research Questions on Improving Financial Access series.