Publications

 

La mitad del mundo no tiene servicios financieros

Durante el último cuarto de siglo, el movimiento de las microfinanzas ha llevado a una expansión global de servicios financieros para los pobres del mundo. La Campaña de la Cumbre de Microcrédito, un grupo de defensa líder, contó 154 millones clientes en todo el mundo a finales de 2008. Eso es impresionante, pero es sólo un comienzo en relación con la demanda insatisfecha. Los expertos coinciden en que la demanda insatisfecha de financiación es grande, pero el número exacto (o incluso un número aproximado, pero creíble) ha sido difícil de precisar, con estimaciones que van desde quinientos millones de personas a tres mil millones. 

Microfinance Tradeoffs: Regulation, Competition, and Financing

We describe important trade-offs that microfinance practitioners, donors, and regulators navigate. Drawing evidence from large, global surveys of microfinance institutions, we find a basic tension between meeting social goals and maximizing financial performance. For example, non-profit microfinance institutions make far smaller loans on average and serve more women as a fraction of customers than do commercialized microfinance banks, but their costs per dollar lent are also much higher. Potential trade-offs therefore arise when selecting contracting mechanisms, level of commercialization, rigor of regulation, and the extent of competition. Meaningful interventions in microfinance will require making deliberate choices – and thus embracing and weighing tradeoffs carefully. 

Jonathan Morduch on microlending

Financial Access Initiative managing director Jonathan Morduch talks about measuring the impact of microlending.

Access to Finance: Chapter 2, Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 5

Expanding access to financial services holds the promise to help reduce poverty and spur economic development. But, as a practical matter, commercial banks have faced challenges expanding access to poor and low-income households in developing economies, and nonprofits have had limited reach. We review recent innovations that are improving the quantity and quality of financial access. They are taking possibilities well beyond early models centered on providing “microcredit” for small business investment. We focus on new credit mechanisms and devices that help households manage cash flows, save, and cope with risk. Our eye is on contract designs, product innovations, regulatory policy, and ultimately economic and social impacts. We relate the innovations and empirical evidence to theoretical ideas, drawing links in particular to new work in behavioral economics and to randomized evaluation methods. 

The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence, Brief

Microcredit is commonly credited with reducing poverty, empowering women, and delivering other important impacts, particularly to extremely poor house- holds. Rhetoric, however, has outpaced evidence. Empirical studies are scarce, and existing ones have been influential despite a lack of thorough scrutiny. In this paper, David Roodman and FAI managing director Jonathan Morduch attempt to replicate the two most-noted studies on the impact of microcredit, both based on survey data from Bangladesh collected in the 1990s. Pitt and Khandker (PK, 1998) find that microcredit raises household consumption, especially when lent to women. Khandker (2005) concurs and goes further to say that microcredit has more of an impact on the extremely poor than on the moderately poor. Morduch (1998) finds no evidence for impact on consumption levels, but does find that microcredit. decreases the volatility of consumption. This paper shows that the evidence for impact is weak in all of these studies. But, significantly, it doesn’t find that microcredit causes harm, and it doesn’t prove that the impacts commonly attributed to microcredit—like reducing poverty and empowering women—do not exist. Rather, this paper shows that it’s hard to draw much from these data—and that better answers will need to come from other data sets using other methods.