Week of February 22, 2016

1. Racial Wealth Gap: La June Montgomery Tabron, President and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, applies insights from the US Financial Diaries project to the economic realities of families of color in America, where a persistent racial wealth gap and structural impediments to equality remain. Stanford Social Innovation Review

2. Behavioral Economics: Behavioral "nudges" incorporated into policy design may produce some change but fall short of solving major issues like encouraging retirement savings among the poor. As Eduardo Porter puts it, "fancy cognitive tricks may fail to overcome the main obstacle faced by the poor: a lack of money." The New York Times

3. Cash Transfers: At a recent event, Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton touched on foreign aid, global and national inequality, and globalization. He also warned the development community of potential unintended consequences of cash transfers as the intervention grows in popularity. Center on Foreign Relations

4. Financial Diaries: New research from Smallholder Diaries provides an in-depth look into the financial lives of farmers across Mozambique, Pakistan, and Tanzania. One particularly interesting insight - the majority of earned household income across the sample comes from non-agricultural activities (as high as 93% in Mozambique). CGAP

5. External Validity: Using an analysis of studies from top economics journals, David Evans pinpoints a relationship between a paper's title and an implicit statement on the external validity of its content. The World Bank - Development Impact

July 1, 2026

Financial Access Initiative

The Same As It Ever Was Edition

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

June 26, 2026

Laura Freschi and Timothy Ogden

Financial inclusion’s efficiency is now exposure: Four notes from the faiVLive webinar on emerging AI cyberthreats

The idea for this conversation was born from alarm. At the news that the US Treasury Secretary and the Chair of the Federal Reserve had called a meeting with the CEOs of the twenty largest banks in America to talk about threats to the financial system from emerging frontier AI models, Tim had questions: what about the community banks, the credit unions, and the CDFIs—the financial institutions that serve low-income communities and small businesses in America? When will they be invited to the meetings on how to defend their systems against AIs that can exploit software vulnerabilities with unprecedented ease and speed? And globally, are the regulators in middle-income and developing countries also holding meetings to discuss how they can defend against these threats? Will those meetings include anyone beyond the largest banks?

May 19, 2026

Tracy Cole

What it Takes to Improve Small Business Job Quality: Midterm Findings from Shared Success

Small businesses in the US employ nearly two-thirds of workers earning low wages, making them central to both economic mobility and the quality of work itself. Shared Success, launched by Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program with support from the Gates Foundation, is built on the premise that job quality is fundamental to economic resilience, particularly in historically underserved communities. The project worked with 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to embed job quality support into their programming.

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