Articles, blogs and papers we've been reading over the past month:
- Obama to appoint Eldar Shafir to financial capability advisory council
- NYT: Big Data's Grassroots Revolution
- Eye-Witness Accounts of Vikram Akula's Humble Harvard Talk
- First Edition of the Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopm
- Mobile Banking and Financial Inclusion: two perspectives in Slate Magazine
- New credit-risk models for the unbanked, a new report from McKinsey on Society
- Ignacio Mas: "...what poor people need most is to be connected. With connections come opportunities."
- A new paper on the science of willpower
- Timothy Ogden on the Poor and the True Costs of Joining Financial Systems
- Microfinance in Bangladesh: It's Not What You Thought says Elisabeth Rhyne
- Daniel Rozas on "The Economics of Microsavings" and "High yield savings as the lynchpin of deposit-driven microfinance"
- David Leonhardt's must read on our middle-class entitlement
- Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta argue rich people make better parents in: Stress Impacts Good Parenting
- The Roodman-Bateman Debate: A CFI Dialogue
- NYT: Your mistaken belief in financial willpower
- What cash transfers tell us about the humanitarian community
Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch