Blog postsRSS
Displaying all posts under the topic of Customers
In last week’s blog post, I suggested that self-reported data should be supplemented with objective sources of information from independent third-party entities. Sometimes, however, independent data sources simply aren’t available and researchers have no choice but to base their analysis on self-reported data. Under these circumstances, some data collection methodologies might be more useful than others in ensuring that self-reported data are reliable.
Half of the adults in the world are “unbanked” -- about 2.5 billion people. That’s the starting point of a new book, Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion, published by the MIT Press.
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.
April 17, 2013
In Conversation with Economist Rohini Pande
Timothy Ogden and Economist Rohini Pande discuss how standard microcredit may undermine business investment in this FAI Video interview.
Transcript of the Conversation
April 4, 2013
Beyond Business: Rethinking Microfinance
In just 30 years, the microfinance movement has reached 200 million people who had been deemed "unbankable." That's a stunning success. But the narrative that drove this success has implicitly shut the vast majority of the unbanked out of the system. That's why it's time to change the story, and our minds, on how microfinance works, argue FAI's Jonathan Morduch and Timothy Ogden in Foreign Policy.
March 25, 2013
A Revolution at Home
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist:
Jonathan Morduch talks about the reality of the poverty in a keynote address at The College of St. Scholastica.
March 7, 2013
FAI Video: A Conversation with Pascaline Dupas
Pascaline Dupas of Stanford University talks to FAI about testing a commitment savings product for health investments. You can read more about the experiment in Dupas's paper with Jonathan Robinson, "Why Don't the Poor Save More? Evidence from Health Savings Experiments," and more about the latest in savings on our site at Big Questions-Savings.
March 5, 2013
Women and the Success of Mobile Financial Services
The mobile money revolution has been greeted with great excitement in some circles for the potential it holds to increase financial access for the world’s poorest. Women may especially benefit from expanding financial inclusion through mobile financial services (MFS).
We wrote a post a few months ago about a paper that looks at how microinsurance affects decision-making. Specifically, the paper analyzed whether insuring farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, against rainfall-related risks (too much or too little) affected their investment and production decisions.