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Displaying all posts under the topic of Data
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.
May 24, 2013
New & Noteworthy
Below are the latest and greatest articles, reports, and research from the field of microfinance and economic development. From remittances in Asia to microinsurance in Africa, it’s definitely been an interesting week!
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.
Program evaluations and policy proposals are only as good as the data upon which they are based. Although we all know this to be true, discussions about the reliability of data, especially self-reported data, have only recently emerged in the field of development economics.
April 5, 2013
Measuring (and Missing) Financial Inclusion
The fastest growing part of the financial inclusion movement isn’t a product or even a standard, it’s data and measurement. And if there’s something experts are increasingly agreeing on, it’s that it is illusory to try to define financial inclusion in any precise, universal way. John Gitau says he’s confused, and so am I. How do you measure financial inclusion?
March 25, 2013
A Revolution at Home
From Dave Birch's review of Banking the World at The Enlightened Economist:
March 20, 2013
Reliability of Self-Reported Data – Recall Bias
In a recent post, Tim Ogden and I discussed the importance of having solid, reliable data on which to base program evaluations and policy decisions.
February 5, 2013
What’s next for KGFS?
What’s next in financial access in 2013? Bindu Ananth and Deepti George say a focus on measuring and improving quality.
January 16, 2013
Bad Data
At FAI, we’re big advocates for data. Why? Because you can’t make good policy without data. Data can be collected in many ways and come in many forms: transaction records, panel surveys, financial diaries, or field experiment results. We get excited about the opportunity to collect or analyze data about the financial behavior of poor households.