Viewing all posts with tag: Impact Investing  

Week of December 6, 2019

1. Trends: Futurism has always come more easily to technologists than policy wonks (probably because it’s easier). But big gatherings are a good chance to look ahead to how the whole inclusive finance ecosystem, getting more complex each year, will evolve. e-MFP’s annual survey of financial inclusion trends – the Financial Inclusion Compass 2019 – was launched during EMW2019, and tries to do just this. If there were a single theme to this paper, it’s the disconnect between, on the one hand, individual stakeholders with their own interests and objectives, and on the other a collective confusion, a ‘soul-searching’ of sorts, for financial inclusion’s purpose amidst the panoply of initiatives and indicators in a sector of now bewildering complexity.

Digital transformation of institutions ranked top, a theme that dominated last year’s European Microfinance Award (EMA) and EMW, with Graham Wright’s keynote call for MFIs to “Digitise or Die!” (and see also the FinDev webinar series on the subject). Client protection remains at the forefront, (second in the rankings, see point 4 below for more going on here) and client-side digital innovations, despite the ubiquitous hype, is only in third overall – and only 7th among practitioners, who actually have to implement FinTech for clients. Do they know something that consultants and investors do not? Among New Areas of Focus (which looks 5-10 years down the track), Agri-Finance is clearly top. The Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, Mastercard Foundation and ISF Advisors’ Pathways to Prosperity presents the current state-of-the-sector. It’s worth looking at. Finally, Social Performance and/or Impact Measurement is 5th out of 20 trends. There’s too much to choose from here. But the CGAP blog on impact and evidence digs into the subject from a whole range of angles. And check out Tim’s CDC paper [No quid pro quo!--Tim] from earlier this year on the impact of investing in financial systems. Good to see that financial regulators are also giving this the attention it needs.

Finally, finance for refugees and displaced populations generated a lot of comments in the Compass - and was the biggest jumper in the New Area of Focus rankings. It’s been a big part of EMW for the last few years; climate migration was the theme of the excellent conference opening keynote by Tim McDonnell, journalist and National Geographic Explorer, and there’s lots of recent data (here in a World Bank blog) showing refugee numbers at (modern) record levels. Migration of course is inextricably linked to labor conditions. Low paid and low quality work drives migration [maybe we should have more research on migration as a household finance strategy--Tim]. For more on the ‘World of Work’ in the coming century, see below.

2. Climate Change: There may be more evolution in climate change/climate finance than any other area of financial inclusion today. From our side, the European Microfinance Award 2019 on ‘Strengthening Climate Change Resilience’ wrapped up last month, with APA Insurance Ltd of Kenya chosen as the winner for insuring pastoralists against forage deterioration that result in livestock deaths due to droughts . Forage availability is determined by satellite data, via the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). A short video on the program can be seen here.

The severity of climate change and the increasing impact it has on the world’s most vulnerable hardly needs outlining here. Progress has been excruciatingly slow. But a new report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, headed by Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, aims to change that. Released in September 2019, it mapped out a $1.8 trillion blueprint to ready the world to withstand intensifying climate impacts. The Commission launched the report in a dozen capitals, with the overarching goal of jolting governments and businesses into action.

A bunch of recent publications illustrate the overdue acceleration of responses. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Climate Change Resilience Index is pretty stark reading. Africa will be hit the hardest by climate change according to the Index – with 4.7% real GDP loss by 2050 (well supported by the rankings in the ND-Gain index from Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), which summarizes countries’ vulnerability to (and readiness for) climate change. The EIU index shows that institutional quality matters a lot in minimising the effects. The paper also presents three case studies that highlight the importance of both economic development and policy effectiveness to tackle climate change. It’s worth a (fairly frightening) read. So is AFI’s new paper “Inclusive green finance: a survey of the policy landscape”, which asks and answers why financial regulators are working on climate change, how they have been integrating climate change concerns in their national financial inclusion policies and other financial sector strategies, and how they are collaborating with national agencies or institutions. Blue Orchard has also just published "Rethinking Climate Finance" which points to a US$400 billion shortfall by 2030 in climate finance, just to keep global temperatures within the 1.5 Celsius limit. The authors advocate various blended-finance products to encourage private sector investment, which, their survey reveals, is woefully low considering how significantly those investors perceive climate change risk to their portfolios.

Read More

Week of August 2, 2019

1. Financial Systems: I've referenced several times over the last year some work I've been doing for the CDC (the UK DFI, not the one in Atlanta) on investing in financial systems. The first public version of that work, a summary of a much longer paper that I'm still hoping to finish in the next few weeks, is now available. As a summary, it necessarily elides a lot but it does capture what I think are the essential points on the topic right now. The main one I want to highlight here is a somewhat esoteric one: the question in front of us in the sector is not whether or not financial systems matter for the poor, it's whether we know how to intervene in the development of those systems in ways that specifically benefit target populations we care about, in the timeframes and manner in which we can measure. It's an important distinction that I think is missing in too many current conversations about where we are on financial inclusion. Please do read it, and let me now what you think.
In related financial system development and development ideas, Paddy Carter from CDC pointed me to this paper from Paula Bustos, Gabriel Garber and Jacopo Ponticelli on how the financial system in Brazil channeled a productivity shock in agriculture into other sectors (which apparently is on its way to appearing in the QJE) which is exactly what one hopes a financial system accomplishes from a development perspective.
The longer paper for CDC and my research for it emphasizes the history of financial system development. A couple of 2018 books on the topic, specifically on John Lawand Walter Bagehot, are reviewed in the New Yorker by John Lanchester. Rebecca Spang has some thoughts on the continuing focus on the "great man" approach to the history of financial systems and how that misleads. Again, I hope that my work for CDC takes this into account by spotlighting what we know about informal financial systems and how to factor that into thinking about investing in financial system development.
Finally on this topic, two papers that I've had sitting in open tabs for quite some time but have never found a place for in the faiV. First, here's Anginer,Demirgüç-Kunt, and Mare on how institutions affect how much bank capital influences systemic risk (and here's the blog summary). The bottom line is that bank capital matters less when there are well functioning regulatory institutions, but higher capital requirements can substitute for quality institutions in reducing risk. Of course, those higher capital requirements limit the outreach and inclusion of those banks. Trade-offs forever. And here's Ben-David, Palvia and Stulz on how banks in the US react under distress finding that the banks generally reacted prudently rather than gambling in an attempt to revive their sick balance sheets. Which is a further argument for higher capital requirements in weak institutional settings, but creating an alternative system for financial inclusion that isn't bank-based.

2. The Corrupted Economy: My comments a few weeks ago on the "great convergence" and the "corrupted economy" in the US got more positive feedback than I was expecting. So we may now have a new regular section of the faiV.
Unequal access to a quality education is one of the areas where the US increasingly looks like middle income countries. Here's a minor, but infuriating, version of the corrupted system: wealthy parents giving up their children to "guardians" so those children can in turn apply for financial aid as if they don't have any resources. And here's a less blatantly evil version of a similar corruption: children who receive extra time on tests due to some psychological/medical diagnosis are disproportionately white and wealthy--because those are the parents who can afford the thousands of dollars required to pay a private psychologist to deliver such a diagnosis. And the issue is much broader than that because the article only briefly touches on the systemic impact on families and school districts, one I'm acutely aware of personally. I know the educational outcomes for my son, with a rare disease, are almost certainly going to be much better than many other kids in this country with the same disease, because we can afford to live in a school district that isn't so strapped for cash that they have to cut back on services, and I can be an intimidating presence in meetings with the district when necessary.
Here's a story about how the "adjustment" payments for farmers negatively affected by Trump's trade war are all going to the largest, wealthiest farmers. Here's a story about how minor criminal offenses are turned into profits and debtors prison. And here's a story about the actual labor market conditions faced by the lower half of the income distribution: a few days in the life of a meal-delivery bicyclist in NYC. Marvel at how DoorDash preys on income volatility to take tips away from riders. And how the riders' existence is pushed to margins with minimal and shrinking interaction with the customers, how they acknowledge that they are being used to generate data so they can be replaced by drones, and in the meantime how they are subject to the capricious whims of NYC police who can confiscate their bikes on a pretext at any time. And how the riders are grateful that this is a step above working directly for the restaurants. This is America.
And speaking of the Great Convergence, check out this trailer for a new Indian movie about a heroic effort to help kids break out of their corrupted economy. Then think about the long history of American movies with essentially the same plot:Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, etc. etc. And they are all essentially a distraction from the systemic issues.

Read More

Week of June 21, 2019

1. Concentration Camps: The United States is operating concentration campsagain, and one soon will be at the site of one of the Japanese-American camps operated in the 1940s. The conditions are inhumane and unconscionable, both for children and for adults,and getting worse. People are dying. Babies are being denied medical care. Last week, I joked about a scream of helpless rage about financial literacy programs. This week, I'm not joking, and I don't know what else to do, except to do my best to not look away.

2. Philanthropy and Social Investment (and Microfinance): What would it look like if US philanthropy en masse decided the reappearance of concentration camps in the United States was a crisis that deserved all hands and funds on deck? I don't know, but I don't think historians would view that decision unkindly.
There is something going on in American philanthropy--for the first time since 1986, charitable giving did not track GDP, falling 1.7% last year. More specifically, giving by individuals fell 3.4% and for the first time (since the data has been tracked) made up less than 70% of total contributions. Here's the researchers' analysis of the new data. And here's Ben Soskis' Twitter thread on the important questions the decline in giving raises about giving culture and inequality. Several years ago I speculated about whether Giving Tuesday's hidden theory of change was to shore up American giving culture, and that question has new relevance.
On the social investment front, there's a new book out that I can recommend, A Research Agenda for Financial Inclusion and Microfinance. If you're wondering about the connection to social investment, Jonathan and I have the opening chapter, "The Challenge of Social Investment Through the Lens of Microfinance." Keeping on that theme, Beisland, Ndaki and Mersland have a new paper on agency costs for non-profit and for-profit microfinance firms, finding that CEO power determines whether residual losses are higher or lower in non-profit firms. Governance matters in social investment!
If you're one of those CEOs (or just any aspiring social entrepreneur), you may be interested in Alex Counts', founder of the Grameen Foundation, new book, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind. Here's an interview with Alex about the book and the evolution of microfinance (which I'm including even though he says a couple of nice things about me).

3. Digital Finance, Part I: Libra: The news of digital finance this week was dominated by the announcement of Libra, Facebook's proposed...well, depending on what you read, either Facebook's "me too" derivative payments service masquerading as crypto, or Facebook's attempt to take over the world and replace all governments. Here's Vox's explainer.
My favorite immediate response was from Erik Hinton, which I have to quote in full: "God, grant me the confidence of Facebook, a company that has managed to lose most of the data that it's either stolen or extorted and has repeatedly been caught lying or miscounting its own analytics, deciding to create a global financial system."
As that response hints, there are a lot of questions. Here's a start at some of them and some answers about who is participating and why. Here are Tyler Cowen's questions about how exactly Libra will work as a currency without an underpinning banking and regulatory system. Here's a view that Facebook's main target in the near-term is remittances, but that it really does have ambitions to replace national currencies. One of the things I find most interesting about the whole thing is that this is a like Facebook building a giant sign to the world's governments saying: "Come seize all our data and regulate us heavily!" (and governments are indeed reading the sign!) I would guess that there will be approximately .1 seconds between the first cross-border transfer and an accusation of money laundering or terrorist financing. I was having a conversation this week about the main reason Amazon hasn't started consumer lending: it would never do something to invite regulator access to its data.
Here's a piece on the good and bad of Libra which I highlight because it's an odd mix of complete ignorance about how money works and evolved (did you know that before bitcoin there had never been money that wasn't controlled by a government?), with some actual engagement on the dangers of private digital monetary systems.

Read More

Week of March 22, 2019

1. Social Investment: You've of course seen many stories about the US college admissions bribery scandal. And if you pay any attention to the world of impact investment you likely have seen that Bill McGlashan, the very public face of one of the world's largest impact investment funds, was one of the people arrested for participating in the scheme. Anand Giridharadas, who has become the very public face of criticism of modern philanthropy and social investment, discusses why McGlashan is "the most important fish" in the story. Here's the Twitter thread versionif you prefer that over a 4 minute video.
Trevor Neilson, co-founder of the Global Philanthropy Group, says that McGlashan's behavior should not be seen as a reflection on impact investing as a whole, because...well apparently because he wrote a Medium post saying that it shouldn't. There's really no argument there other than "Our goals are too important to be worried about means!" if you consider that an argument. Here's Jed Emerson, who may have an argument, but I just don't understand what is happening in this piece. Lauren Cochran, managing director of an impact investing firm, actually has a few arguments attempting to make the same point, including that McGlashan himself was a figurehead chosen to attract investors, but who wasn't involved in actual investment decisions.
She has a nice line about Giridharadas: "using one man’s ethical failings to grab the mic is characteristically self-serving, but as usual, he forgot that there might be a baby in the bath water." It's catchy but wrong. Giridharadas whole point is that there may be a baby in the bath water, but the bathwater is toxic and everyone will be better off, even the baby, if you toss the whole thing. Moreover, the fund that Cochran administers uses this language: "dual expectation of best-in-class financial returns and maximum positive social and environmental impact." And that, to me, is a big part of the toxic nature of the current impact investment environment. On reflection, that statement illuminates what is really happening in Neilson's piece--the fear that if the myth of "no tradeoffs" is exposed then the money will dry up.
To be clear, I'm not in Giridhradas' camp but I certainly appreciate how his perspective keeps putting the "no tradeoffs" crowd on the defensive, and illustrates the inconsistency if not hypocrisy hidden there.
Kristin Gillis Moyer of Mulago points to a terrific example of the inherent tension: the new Catalytic Capital Consortium funded by MacArthur, Rockefeller and Omidyar. It aims to invest in businesses with low profit potential and/or high risk. I find it an incredibly refreshing approach--it explicitly acknowledges that the no tradeoff myth is leaving many social enterprises in the lurch. But as Gillis Moyer points out, it's not clear how catalytic it can be since there are unlikely to be that many other investors chomping at the bit to invest in low-profit, risky businesses. I'd like to think the catalytic part will be creating space for more funds and investors to say that they prioritize impact over financial returns, and that's OK.

2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Because the faiV was so full I'd been holding on to a few things on this topic, and events have made them all the more relevant. Platforms for open sharing seemed like such a good idea for a long time. But the cost of open sharing is so so much higher than most anticipated. Not only does it enable evil, but attempting to stop evil exacts a huge toll on human beings. This is a story about the Facebook contractors whose job it is to stop the New Zealand murderer's live stream. And a Twitter thread from someone in a similar position at Google. I'm guessing many of those folks are inching toward Calvinism.
Evgeny Morozov has a different take on the costs that open platforms and big tech exact, and why the global white nationalist movement has very different views on that front. It is a helpful reminder of the costs of the old system and the structures that the liberal order created to try to limit those costs, structures that seem to not work so well in this age, and are under attack from many directions. That's in part the theme of a new book reviewed by Noah Smith, The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. I haven't read the book but the review is certainly influencing my thinking on the above.
Oh, and Chinese firms are working on facial recognition of pigs, while US police forces are using bad data to train their facial recognition and other AI systems. Andwhat about "behavioral recognition"? Note that this has quite obvious connections to the use of psychometrics and other "alternative data" for creditworthiness evaluations.

3. Household Finance: There's a huge amount of new stuff here, so I'm going to be particularly eccentric this week. There's a lot more coming in the following weeks that will be more serious.
One of the questions that fascinates me these days is what is good financial advice for households that face a lot of income volatility. The foundation of virtually everything in the financial advice world is the lifecycle model--and we know that doesn't apply to a very large proportion of households. That doesn't stop the financial advice industry from thriving--but like so many other things, the internet has disrupted that world a great deal. And that disruption creates perverse incentives. Here's the story of the "Fall of America's Money Answers Man", a once-respectable financial advice columnist who turned into a con artist.

Read More

Week of September 24, 2018

1. Poverty and Inequality Measurement: How do you measure poverty, and by extension, inequality? Given how common a benchmark poverty is, it's easy to sometimes lose sight of how hard defining and measuring it is.
Martin Ravallion has a new paper on measuring global inequality that takes into account that both absolute and relative poverty (within a country) matter--for many reasons it's better to be poor in a high-income country than a low-income one, which is often missed in global inequality measures. Here's Martin's summary blog post. When you take that into account, global inequality is significantly higher than in other measures, but still falling since 1990.
The UK has a new poverty measure, created by the Social Metrics Commission (a privately funded initiative, since apparently the UK did away with its official poverty measure?) that tries to adjust for various factors including wealth, disability and housing adequacy among other things. Perhaps most interestingly it tries to measure both current poverty and persistent poverty recognizing that most of the factors that influence poverty measures are volatile. Under their measure they find that about 23% of the population lives in poverty, with half of those, 12.1%, in persistent poverty.
You can think about persistence of poverty in several ways: over the course of a year, over several years, or over many years--otherwise known as mobility. There's been a lot of attention in the US to declining rates of mobility and the ways that the upper classes limit mobility of those below them. That can obscure the fact that there is downward mobility (48% of white upper middle class kids end up moving down the household income ladder, using this tool based on Chetty et al data). I'm not quite sure what to make of this new paper, after all I'm not a frequent reader of Poetics which is apparently a sociology journal, but it raises an interesting point: the culture of the upper middle class that supposedly passes on privilege may be leading to downward mobility as well.
There's also status associated with class and income. On that dimension, mobility in the US has declined by about a quarter from the 1940s cohort to the 1980s cohort. That's a factor of "the changing distribution of occupational opportunities...not intergenerational persistence" however. But intergenerational persistence may be on the rise because while the wealth of households in the top 10% of the distribution has recovered since the great recession, the wealth of the bottom 90% is still lower, and for the bottom 30% has continued to fall during the recovery.

2. Debt: What factors could be contributing to the wealth stagnation and even losses of the bottom 90% in the US? Just going off the top of my head, predatory debt could be a factor. If only we had a better handle on household debt and particularly the most shadowy parts of the high-cost lending world. Or maybe it's the skyrocketing amount of student debt, combined with bait-and-switch loan forgiveness programs that are denying 99% of the applicants. I'll bet the CFPB student loan czar will be all over this scandal. Oh wait, that's right, he resigned after being literally banned from doing his job.

Read More

Week of September 10, 2018

1. US Inequality: I talk a lot about congruence between the US and developing countries, but usually in the context of sharing lessons in the financial inclusion domain. But there are other domains where there is a lot more commonality. For instance radically corrupt policing. While this paper has been circulating for awhile, it's worth revisiting over and over again, and it's acceptance for publication is a convenient excuse. US cities and towns, when faced with budget deficits, ramp up arrests and fines of and property seizures from black and brown citizens but not white ones. Here's the easy to share Twitter thread version so you can send it to your not so economics-paper-inclined friends. To be clear, it's only second-order racism. The reason seems to be it's much easier to get away with stealing from people of color because of systemic racism.
Systemic racism like the premium that blacks pay for apartments, a premium that rises with the fraction white a neighborhood is. Lucky that the place you live has little effect on the quality of your education or your future job market opportunities. Oh, wait.
The US is still deeply segregated (cool visualization klaxon) and there has been virtually no progress on that front in decades. Part of the reason is exclusionary zoning which puts a floor on home prices well above the reach of black and brown households. Apparently though, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is planning on tying future grants to cities to cutting zoning restrictions on multi-family dwellings. That would be a rare bright light in the current administration's deregulation push.

2. Cash: I haven't done anything on cash transfers, universal, conditional or otherwise in quite a while. This week we got a flood. I'm going to try to cover the landscape first, before some summary thoughts. Blattman, Fiala and Martinez have an update on their cash grants to youth clubs in Uganda paper--the one that found large gains after four years. After nine years, the controls have caught up. Chris used the analogy of "a tightly coiled spring" as an explanation for why the gains in the first four years were so surprisingly large--and that analogy may still hold. No matter how high the spring jumps, it eventually returns to baseline. Here's Chris's Twitter thread on how his thinking has changed. Here's a Vox article by Dylan Matthews. At this point, if you pay any attention at all, you should expect Berk Ozler to have some thoughts. He does.
Meanwhile, IPA pulled off the greatest unintentional (I'm told by reliable sources--hi Jeff!) mass market advertisement for the release of a development economics working paper in history when the NYTimes Fixes column ran a long-delayed piece by Marc Gunther on using cash as a benchmark for development programs on Tuesday. The paper was being released Thursday. That paper, a comparison of a Catholic Relief Services program to a cost-equivalent cash grant, and a much larger cash grant, by McIntosh and Zeitlin is here. The IPA brief is here. The Vox article is here. And Berk's thoughts (about the Vox coverage really) are here. And Tavneet Suri's. But I'll give Craig and Andrew the last word--here's their post on Development Impact on how they think about the study and the issues.

Read More

Week of September 3, 2018

1. Social Investing: Calling out the bland and meaningless rhetoric in social and impact investing almost seems unsporting--it's just too easy but it's Friday after a long week so I'm going to do it anway. Take this piece from John Elkington, who coined the term "triple bottom line," (Please), saying it's time to "rethink" or "recall" or "give up on" it (all his phrases). Why? Because the term has been misunderstood and misappropriated for uses well short of what he intended. Instead he thinks we need "a triple helix for value creation, a genetic code for tomorrow’s capitalism." But apparently not a clear definition or a recognition of trade-offs under scarcity.
Then there's this piece from the Wall Street Journal on the meaninglessness of words like "ethical", "impact" and "sustainable" in the mutual fund world. It's a treasure for the sheer density of laugh out loud snippets. For instance, Deutsche Bank switched out the word "dynamic" in the title of a family of funds and replaced it with "sustainable." Vanguard's bar for a company being "socially responsible" is literally not enslaving people or manufacturing weapons banned by international treaty. But my favorite is probably this quote about buyers of "ESG" funds: "We do hear from investors that have bought funds that they never realized did something." (Protip for non-WSJ subscribers who may not otherwise take the trouble to read this gem, search the title in an incognito window, click on the result link and close the invitation to subscribe and you'll be able to read it.)

2. Household Finance, Part I, Theory: Not realizing that funds did something is a good transition to Matt Levine's musings about the relationship between financial services providers and customers (scroll down to "How much should an FX trade cost?"). Matt is writing specifically about investment and corporate banking but the theory fully applies. In short, 'smart' large customers treat banks like commodity providers and ruthlessly push margins toward zero. Banks have to go along because these are large customers and economies of scale matter in financial services. So the banks make up those margins by charging 'loyal' customers much more than 'smart' customers. Which is, shall we say, not what 'loyal' customers think the banks should be doing and they rightly get very angry when they find out. So loyal customers should be more like smart customers and treat banks like commodity providers. The application of faiV interest is the Catch-22 for lower-income households: they only very rarely have the time and choice to treat financial services like a commodity, so they are almost inevitably left subsidizing wealthier customers. And even banks with good intentions struggle to do otherwise, because if you don't have the large customers, you can't drive costs down through scale.
In other theory news, one of the common motivating theories on helping low-income households is helping them plan. Planning is hard when facing scarcity. There's been encouraging evidence of the value of specific planning for getting people to follow through on their intentions. Here's a new paper testing the value of planning for one of the only two intention-action gaps that can rival the intention-action gap on savings: exercise (the other being dieting). It finds that careful detailed planning of an exercise routine has a precisely zero effect on follow-through.
Finally, here's a piece that at face value seems to be talking about the empirical transition away from cash (in the US). But look closely and it's really musing on the theory about the costs of cashlessness for lower-income households, something that deserves a lot more attention, on theory and empirics, than we seem to be getting right now. And it features Lisa Servon and Bill Maurer so you should definitely click.

3. Household Finance, Part II, Practicum: I don't remember how I stumbled across this paper about how US households respond to high upfront medical costs. It's not new, but it was new to me, though I suppose you can also say it's very old to anyone who has paid attention to healthcare consumption in low-income countries. The authors find a large decrease in spending, but no evidence that households are price shopping or making any differentiation between high-value and low-value services. Something to think about--how much of what we call "shocks" for low-income households are actually "spikes" that they didn't have the tools and bandwidth to manage (liquidity) for?

Read More

Week of August 27, 2018

Editor's Note: I'm still playing catch-up this week, and perhaps you are too. It's the "end of summer" in the Northern Hemisphere after all, that week we all get to, in a panic, confront all those things we had put off to the Fall AND all those things we thought we would get done during the "less busy" summer. Catching up notwithstanding, this is a somewhat truncated edition of the faiV, as I head into a weekend of labor related to the above.--Tim Ogden

1. Small Dollar Financial Services: I've been doing a lot of reading the last few weeks about the history of consumer banking (Hi Julia!), and by history I mean going back to the Middle Ages and before. From that reading, it's clear that small dollar lending has always been the bane of the banking system--and there is nothing new under the sun (thanks, David Roodman!). Which certainly colors my view when I see stories about overhauling the overdraft system in the US. Not that I don't think there is room for significant improvement. Overdraft is perhaps the worst possible way to manage small dollar lending--by pretending it's something else while still charging exorbitant fees that would make many microfinance institutions blush. There are plenty of ideas, like this story on a non-profit payday alternative lender which charges roughly half the fees of its competitors. The intent of the story seems to be offering this as a real alternative, but the details keep getting in the way. The nonprofit really is nonprofit in the literal sense of the word, not even being able to pay its CEO a $60,000 per year salary regularly, and facing "four near-death experiences" in 9 years--that sounds about par for the course in small dollar lending from the historical record.    

2. Algorithmic Overlords: Yuval Noah Hariri has a new piece in the Atlantic, the title of which is just candy-coated confirmation bias for me, so how could I resist putting it in the faiV: "Why Technology Favors Tyranny". I'm feeling validated that I started reading Asimov's I, Robot to my kids this week. But back to Hariri, two thoughts: a) borrowing a category from Tyler Cowen, this is a very interesting sentence: "At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans!", and b) the picture Hariri paints bears a remarkable resemblance to the Allende plan in Chile specifically, and to almost every example in Seeing Like A State, it's just that the technology is finally catching up to the political ideology. The big question, of course, is whether the technology will yield any better results.
One more item I couldn't resist is this piece about blockchain and supposed complacency toward technological innovation in development. The most important thing to know is that the two examples given of the benefits of a decentralized ledger (e.g. blockchain) are two of the most centralized and highly policed ledgers in existence: SWIFT and Visa payment networks. It continues with a few potshots at small dollar fintech lenders and then some ersatz blockchain evangelism about power to the people. Let's hope the author reads many of the pieces linked above, but especially Hariri's. And just because, here's a story about the very first blockchain hiding in an ad in the New York Times in 1995.

3. Methods and Evidence: You've likely seen the uproar over ridiculous nutrition studies (on alcohol and dairy--clearly the message is to only drink dairy-based cocktails this weekend) this week. I saw someone on Twitter commenting on how the credibility revolution seems to have passed right by nutritional epidemiology, probably because it would mean that no studies ever got published.
Part of the credibility revolution is the emphasis on open data and replication. Here's a report on the latest large scale replication effort (of 21 social science studies published in Nature and Science). Thirteen of the 21 were generally replicated, but the effect size was roughly half of that originally reported. Of course, this raises the question of what "successful replication" means again. Here's a Twitter thread from Stuart Buck of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation on the difficult distinction between failed replication being a part of the scientific learning process and a failed replication as part of identifying shady research and publishing practices.  
Here's a troubling story about unreliable administrative data. The US Department of Education asked school districts to start reporting "school-related shooting" incidents. There were 240 reported. But follow-up reporting was only able to verify 11 of those incidents and 161 were explicitly denied. Don't let the emotional subject of school shootings distract entirely from the reminder that there are always problems with data gathered like this, no matter what the subject. And pause for a moment to remember that it is data like this that Hariri fears will be used to automate administrative regimes.
The point of these studies, whether ridiculous nutritional ones, or administrative-data based ones, is most often to influence behavior and policy. Here's Jean Dreze on the challenge of evidence-based policy, and the need for economists "to be cautious and modest when it comes to giving policy advice, let alone getting actively involved in 'policy design.'"

4. Global Poverty: On the topic of evidence-informed policy choices, one of the most hotly debated questions in the field right now is what is happening with global poverty. At face value it seems like this is just a question of going to look at the data. But as with so many other areas, different people see very different things in the data (even if it is accurate). It all depends on how you measure poverty and whether you care more about absolute or relative numbers. There was a glimmer of detente in this debate this week as Jason Hickel and Charles Kenny published "12 Things We Can Agree On About Global Poverty." But that only lasted a day before Martin Ravallion chimed in with this Twitter thread, which begins, "it seems they only agree on the obvious, and ignore some less obvious things that really matter."
If you're looking for another way into these debates and the various issues that arrive, here's a Washington Post story about Nigeria displacing India as home to the largest number of people in absolute poverty. Maybe. 

5. Social Investment and Philanthropy: I highlighted a couple reviews of Anand Giridharadas' new book Winners Take All  last week. Here's another, from Ben Soskis, which I include because it's the best one yet. The theme of Giridharadas' book (and Rob Reich's new book as well) is being skeptical of the power of large-scale philanthropy or social investment. Here's a thread from Chris Cardona, of the Ford Foundation, on the multitudes contained in the word philanthropy, which is certainly important to take into account when considering the critiques. But the question of who is a philanthropist, who is abusing their power, and the trade-offs of institutionalization of philanthropy are always messy. Here's a story about a viral GoFundMe campaign to help a homeless man in Philly who gave his last $20 to rescue a stranded motorist. If you have Calvinist sympathies like me, you'll probably guess what happened next. Finally, here's Ed Dolan of the Niskanen Center on whether we need the charitable deduction.

Returning to the topic of methods and evidence-based policy, two images popped up in my Twitter thread this week that I couldn't get out of my head. One is a snippet from a peer reviewer of the social science replication paper highlight above, expla…

Returning to the topic of methods and evidence-based policy, two images popped up in my Twitter thread this week that I couldn't get out of my head. One is a snippet from a peer reviewer of the social science replication paper highlight above, explaining why it was not published in Nature or Science even though it was replications of papers from those journals. And second is a picture taken from a talk John List was giving this week about his career. You have to ask, does science advance via replication or via funerals? Via Brian Nosek and Ben Grodeck respectively.

Week of June 11, 2018

1. Household Finance: If you'll bear with me I'm going to write about household finance mostly with links to pieces about corporate finance. Corporate finance matters a lot, and it deserves the attention and resources invested in it (Channeling Willie Sutton: why do you write papers about corporate finance? Because that's where the money is). After several hundred years of lots and lots of resources and attention we've pretty much got this thing licked right? Well, maybe not the biggest questions but at least the basic questions like accounting and financial reporting, right? Right?
Here's Warren Buffet complaining about Generally Accepted Accounting (GAAP) rules being applied to his company. And here's an argument from several business school professors that GAAP rules aren't meaningful given changes in the economy--with the enticing tidbit that in many companies having a CPA, in other words having deep familiarity with the rules of corporate finance and accounting, is a disqualification for a senior-level job in the finance department. And here's Buffet again, this time with Jamie Dimon, arguing that quarterly financial reporting is broken.
Lest you think that this is some emerging consensus, here's Felix Salmon arguing they are wrong. Here's Matt Levine arguing they're wrong. And here (via Justin Fox, which we'll return to later) is a whole book about GAAP rules being wrong for entirely different reasons.
So all of this is interesting (OK, maybe not) but what does it have to do with household finance? We haven't even begun investing the kind of resources necessary to really understand household finance, but we act like we have all the important questions licked. Or at least that households should be able to, with a little financial literacy training perhaps, be able to get a grasp on their finances and make consistently sound decisions. The fact is, for the most part, we just don't know what we're talking about when we talk about household finance. Or loss aversion.

2. Digital Finance: In another brief diversion to start off an item, an astute reader pointed out that the way I had been writing about Findex made it seem like the Findex team did not have it's own report on the findings. They do, so click on it.
One read of the both the Global Findex team's report and the CFI report highlighted last week is that the promise of digital finance is largely unfulfilled. But there's still a lot of excitement over the promise in places like Egypt apparently. I found this piece particularly remarkable because I stumbled on it right after reading through the Findex analyses, and all I could think was "I don't think that data means what you think it means." Oh, and the note that moving to digital finance would allow the government to closely inspect everyone's spending habits, wheeee!
There's a different sort of excitement over digital finance in Uganda apparently where the parliament has approved taxing mobile money and social media(?!?). Apparently there was some concern that such taxes would be regressive, but some MPs objected that people shouldn't be exempted from paying taxes just because they were poor. Clearly those people don't read CGD/Vox.
In other CGD news related to digital finance, here's a piece about using blockchain in development projects--or perhaps more on point, *not* using the blockchain for development projects. There's a terrific decision tree graphic in the piece that is worth the click on its own, even though I disagree substantially with one part of it.

3. Firms, Productivity and Labor: Earlier this week I attended two days of the Innovation Growth Lab conference put on by Nesta. A number of interesting papers and research proposals were presented--the session I found most interesting was on the global productivity slowdown...

Read More

Week of April 2, 2018

1. Global Development: To start us off, how about some rain on the "rising Kenyan middle class" parade? The core point--that gains from rising incomes that don't translate into durable assets can rapidly be erased, a perspective that should sound familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of anti-poverty policy in the US. 
But the real parade in global development in recent years has been on the value of delivering cash to poor households. This is a train that's been picking up steam for a long while. I would date the current push back to the first studies of Progresa/Opportunidades, the Mexican conditional cash transfer program. Momentum has steadily built around both the positive impact of cash transfers--that recipients don't waste the money, that they use the money productively--and dropping conditions. That momentum was built on many studies, but probably the two most well known in international circles are Blattman, Fiala and Martinez on cash transfers in Uganda, and Haushofer and Shapiro/GiveDirectly in Kenya. Both showed significant gains by recipients of unconditional cash.
Both of those papers were about relatively short-term effects. Both studies included longer-term follow-ups. And you know what's coming: the large positive effects seem to have disappeared in the medium term. Berk Ozler of the World Bank is currently playing the role of Deng (it's the closest I could get geographically) with two lengthy blog posts. The first, keying off comments from Chris Blattman in the recent Conversations with Tyler, but really delving into the recently released update to the Haushofer and Shapiro/GiveDirectly update is the important one for non-specialists. The second is very useful for understanding the specific details of interpretation. The posts also kicked off a number of useful Twitter conversations (here, here, here, here and here, though that's just a sample; just scroll through Chris's and Berk's timelines for more). Berk's first post also takes on the role that academics have played in stoking that momentum and is worth a close read.
I think it's also important to think through what is happening with cash transfers in light of not only of other studies of cash (like this one finding positive effects on the personality of Cherokee Native American kids whose families receive cash that was just officially published) but also other interventions. Deworming is one example--one big source of the controversy over the effects of deworming is that there isn't a medium-term biological effect to explain the the long-term economic effects. The Moving to Opportunity study is another--no short-term or medium-term gains, only long-term ones. And I have to note that the Native American paper is a frustrating example of Berk's critique of the role academics can play in raising expectations too high--the paper's title and abstract simply reference a large positive effect of cash transfers with no indication of when (now? 10 years ago? 30 years ago?), where or who the participants are, or even the size or mechanism of the transfers.

Read More

Week of March 12, 2018

1. Microfinance and Digital Finance: Apparently the "farmer suicide over indebtedness" hype train is kicking up again in India. That's not to imply that farmer suicides are not a serious issue. But Shamika Ravi delves into the data and points out that indebtedness doesn't seem to be the driver of suicides and so attacking lenders or forgiving debts isn't going to fix the problem. Certainly poverty and indebtedness add huge cognitive burdens to people that affect their perceptions and decisions in negative ways, including despair. Here's a new video about poverty's mental tax--there's nothing new here, but a useful and simple explanation of the concepts.
Last year (or the year before) I noted Google's decision to play a role in safeguarding people in desperate straits from negative financial decisions: the company banned ads from online payday lenders, in effect becoming a de facto financial regulator. This week, Google announced another regulatory action. Beginning in June it will ban ads for initial coin offerings (if you don't know what those are, congratulate yourself). While I'm all for the decision, it's strange for Google to conclude that these ads are so dangerous to the public that they should be banned, but not for three more months. Cryptocurrency fraudsters, get a move on! Meanwhile, the need for Google and Apple (and presumably Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba and every other tech platform) to step up their financial regulation game is becoming clearer. In an obviously self-promotional, but still concerning survey web security firm Avast found that 58% of users thought a real banking app was fraudulent, while 36% thought a fraudulent app was real. I don't really buy the numbers, but my takeaway is: people have no idea how to identify digital financial fraud. I wish that seemed more concerning to people in the digital finance world.

2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: I've had a couple of conversations with folks after my review of Automating Inequality, and had the chance to chat quickly with Virginia Eubanks after seeing her speak at the Aspen Summit on Inequality and Opportunity. My views have shifted a bit: in her talk Eubanks emphasized the importance of keeping the focus on who is making decisions, and that the danger that automation can make it much harder to see who (as opposed to how) has discretion and authority. A big part of my concern about the book was that it put too much emphasis on the technology and not the people behind it. Perhaps I was reading my own concerns into the text. I also had a Twitter chat with Lucy Bernholz who should be on your list of people to follow about it. She made a point that has stuck with me: automation, at least as it's being implemented, prioritizes efficiency over rights and care, and that's particularly wrong when it comes to public services.
I closed the review by saying that "the problem is the people"; elsewhere I've joked that "AI is people!" Well at least I thought I was joking. But then I saw this new paper about computational evolution--an application of AI that seeks to have the machine experiment with different solutions to a problem and evolve. And it turns out that while AI may not be people, it behaves just like people do. The paper is full of anecdotes of machines learning to win by gaming the system (and being lazy): for instance, by overloading opponents' memory and making them crash, or deleting the answer key to a test in order to get a perfect score. I think the latter was the plot of 17 teen movie comedies in the '80s. Reading the paper is rewarding but if you just want some anecdotes to impress your friends at the bar tonight, here's a twitter thread summary. It's funny, but honestly I found it far scarier than that video of the robot opening a door from last month. Apparently our hope against the robots is not the rules that we can write, because they will be really good at gaming them, but that the machines are just as lazy as we are.
To round out today's scare links, here's a news item about a cyberattack against a chemical plant apparently attempting to cause an explosion; and here's a useful essay on our privacy dystopia.

Read More

Week of March 4, 2018

1. Crappy Financial Products: The results are no surprise, but it remains troubling to see the numbers. “Color and Credit” is a 2018 revision of a 2017 paper by Taylor Begley and Amitatosh Purnanandam. The subtitle is “Race, Regulation, and the Quality of Financial Services.” Most studies of consumer financial problems look at quantity: the lack of access to financial products. But here the focus is on quality: You can get products, but they’re lousy. Too often, they’re mis-sold, fraudulent, and accompanied by bad customer service. These problems had been hard to see, but they’ve been uncovered via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Complaints database, a terrifically valuable, publicly accessible—and freely downloadable—database. (Side note: this makes me very nervous about the CFPB’s current commitment to maintaining the data.)

Thousands of complaints are received each week, and the authors look at 170,000 complaints from 2012-16, restricted to mortgage problems. The complaints come from 16,309 unique zipcodes – and the question is: which zipcodes have the most complaints and why? The first result is that low income and low educational attainment in a zipcode are strongly associated with low quality products. Okay, you already predicted that. On top of those effects, the share of the local population identified as being part of a minority group also predicts low quality. No surprise again, but you might not have predicted the magnitude: The minority-share impact is 2-3 times stronger then the income or education impact (even when controlling for income and education). The authors suspect that active discrimination is at work, citing court cases and mystery shopper exercises which show that black and Hispanic borrowers are pushed toward riskier loans despite having credit scores that should merit better options. So, why? Part of the problem could be that efforts to help the most disadvantaged areas are backfiring. Begley and Purnanandam give evidence that regulation to help disadvantaged communities actually reduces the quality of financial products. The culprit is the Community Reinvestment Act, and the authors argue that by focusing the regs on increasing the quantity of services delivered in certain zipcodes, the quality of those services has been compromised – and much more so in heavily-minority areas. Unintended consequences that ought to be taken seriously.

2. TrumpTown: Another great database. ProPublica is a national resource – a nonprofit newsroom. They’ve been doing a lot of data gathering and number-crunching lately. Four items today are from ProPublica. The first is the geekiest: a just-released, searchable database of 2,475 Trump administration appointees. The team spent a year making requests under the Freedom of Information Act, allowing you to now spend the afternoon getting to know the mid-tier officials who are busily deregulating the US economy. The biggest headline is that, of the 2,475 appointees, 187 had been lobbyists, 125 had worked at (conservative) think tanks, and 254 came out of the Trump campaign. Okay, that’s not too juicy. Still, the database is a resource that could have surprising value, even if it’s not yet clear how. Grad students: have a go at it. (Oh, and I’d like to think that ProPublica would have done something similar if Hilary Clinton was president.)

3. Household Finance (and Inequality): This ProPublica story is much more juicy, and much more troubling. Writing in the Washington Post, ProPublica’s Paul Kiel starts: “A ritual of spring in America is about to begin. Tens of thousands of people will soon get their tax refunds, and when they do, they will finally be able to afford the thing they’ve thought about for months, if not years: bankruptcy.” Kiel continues, “It happens every tax season. With many more people suddenly able to pay a lawyer, the number of bankruptcy filings jumps way up in March, stays high in April, then declines.” Bankruptcy is a last resort, but for many people it’s the only way to get on a better path. Even when straddled with untenable debt, it turns out to be costly to get a fresh start.

The problem will be familiar to anyone who has read financial diaries: the need for big, lumpy outlays can be a huge barrier to necessary action. Bankruptcy lawyers usually insist on being paid upfront (especially for so-called “chapter 7” bankruptcies). The problem is that if the lawyers agreed to be paid later, they fear that their fees would also be wiped away by the bankruptcy decision. So, the lawyers put themselves first. The trouble is that the money involved is sizeable: The lawyers’ costs plus court fees get close to $1500. The irony abounds. Many people tell Kiel that if they could easily come up with that kind of money, then they probably wouldn’t be in the position to go bankrupt. Bankruptcy judges see the problem and are trying to jerry-rig solutions, but nonprofits haven’t yet made this a priority. So, for over-indebted households, waiting to receive tax refunds turns out to be a key strategy.

Read More

First Week of March, 2018

1. Global Development: One of the more encouraging trends in development economics as far as I'm concerned is the growth of long-term studies that report results not just once but on an on-going basis. Obviously long-term tracking like the Young Lives Project or smaller scale work like Robert Townsend's tracking of a Thai village (which continues to yield valuable insights) falls in this category, but it's now also happening with long term follow-up from experimental studies. Sometimes that takes the form of tracking down people affected by earlier studies, as Owen Ozier did with deworming in Kenya. But more often it seems, studies are maintaining contact over longer time frames. A few weeks ago I mentioned a new paper following up on Bloom et. al.'s experiment with Indian textile firms. The first paper found significant effects of management consulting in improving operations and boosting profits. The new paper sees many, but not all, of those gains persist eight years later. Another important example is the on-going follow up of the original Give Directly experiment on unconditional cash transfers. Haushofer and Shapiro have new results from a three year follow-up, finding that as above, many gains persist but not all and the comparisons unsurprisingly get a bit messier.
Although it's not quite the same, I do feel like I should include some new work following up on the Targeting the Ultra Poor studies--in this case not of long-term effects but on varying the packages and comparing different approaches as directly as possible. Here's Sedlmayr, Shah and Sulaiman on a variety of cash-plus interventions in Uganda--the full package of transfers and training, only the transfers, transfers with only a light-touch training and just attempting to boost savings. They find that cash isn't always king: the full package outperforms the alternatives.

2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: If you missed it, yesterday's special edition faiV was a review of Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality. But there's always a slew of interesting reads on these issues, contra recent editorials that no one is paying attention. Here's NYU's AINow Institute on Algorithmic Impact Assessments as a tool for providing more accountability around the use of algorithms in public agencies. While I tend to focus this section on unintended negative consequences of AI, there is another important consideration: intended negative consequences of AI. I'm not talking about SkyNet but the use of AI to conduct cyberattacks, create fraudulent voice/video, or other criminal activities. Here's a report from a group of AI think tanks including EFF and Open AI on the malicious use of artificial intelligence.

3. Interesting Tales from Economic History: I may make this a regular item as I tend to find these things quite interesting, and based on the link clicks a number of you do too. Here's some history to revise your beliefs about the Dutch Tulip craze, a story it turns out that has been too good to fact check, at least until Anne Goldgar of King's College did so. And here's work from Judy Stephenson of Oxford doing detailed work on working hours and pay for London construction workers during the 1700s. Why is this interesting? Because it's important to understand the interaction of productivity gains, the industrial revolution, wages and welfare--something that we don't know enough about but has implications as we think about the future of work, how it pays and the economic implications for different levels of skills. And in a different vein, but interesting none-the-less, here is an epic thread from Pseudoerasmus on Steven Pinker's new book nominally about the Enlightenment.

Read More

Week of December 4, 2017

1. Social Investment: Last week I was at European Microfinance Week. Video of the closing plenary I participated in is here. My contribution was mainly to repeat what seems to me a fairly obvious point but which apparently keeps slipping from view: there are always trade-offs and if social investors don't subsidize quality financial services for poor households, there will be very few quality financial services for poor households.
Paul DiLeo of Grassroots Capital (who moderated the session at eMFP) pointed me to this egregious example of the ongoing attempt to fight basic logic and mathematics from the "no trade-offs" crowd. This sort of thing is particularly baffling to me because of the close connection that impact investing has to investing--a world where everything is about trade-offs: risk vs. return; sector vs. sector; company vs. company; hedge fund manager vs. hedge fund manager. The logic in this particular case, no pun intended, is that a fund to invest in tech start-ups in the US Midwest is an impact investment, even though the founder explicitly says it isn't, because it is "seeking potential return in parts of the economy neglected by biases of mainstream investors." If that's your definition of impact investing you're going to have a tough time keeping the Koch Brothers, Sam Walton and Ray Dalio out of your impact investment Hall of Fame. Sure, part of the argument is that these are investments that could create jobs in areas that haven't had a lot of quality job growth. But by that logic, mining BitCoin is a tremendous impact investment. You see, mining BitCoin and processing transactions is enormously energy intensive. And someone's got to produce that energy, and keep the grid running. Those electrical grid jobs are one of the few high paying, secure mid-skill jobs. Never mind that BitCoin mining is currently increasing its energy use every day by 450 gigawatt-hours, or Haiti's annual electricity consumption. And, y'know, reversing the trend toward more clean energy. Hey anyone remember the good old days of "BitCoin for Africa"?

2. Philanthropy: There are plenty of trade-offs and questions about impact in philanthropy, not just in impact investing, and not just in programs. Here's a piece I wrote with Laura Starita about making the trade-offs of foundations investing in weapons, tobacco and the like more transparent.
I could have put David Roodman's new reassessment of the impact of de(hook)worming in the American South in early 20th century under a lot of headings (for instance, Roodman once again raises the bar on research clarity, transparency and data visualizations; Worm Wars is back!; etc.). The tack I'm going to take, in keeping with the prior item, is the impact of philanthropy. The deworming program was driven by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and is frequently cited, not only as evidence for current deworming efforts, but as evidence for the value and impact of large scale philanthropy. Roodman, using much more data than was available when Hoyt Bleakley wrote a paper about it more than 10 years ago, finds that there isn't compelling evidence that the Rockefeller program got the impact it was looking for. Existing (and continuing) trends in schooling and earnings appear unaltered. 
Ben Soskis has a good overview of the seminal role hookworm eradication had in the creation of American institutional philanthropy. His post was spurred by an article I linked back in the fall about the return of hookworm in many of the places it was (supposedly?) eradicated from by Rockefeller's philanthropy. We may need to rewrite a lot of philanthropic history to reflect that the widely cited case study in philanthropic impact didn't eradicate hookworm and may not have had much effect. And while we're in the revision process, it may be useful to reassess views on the impact of the Ford Foundation-sponsored Green Revolution: a new paper that argues that there was no measurable impact on national income and the primary effect was keeping people in rural farming communities (as opposed to migrating to urban areas). Given what we now generally know about the value to rural-to-urban migration, that means likely significant negative long-term effects.
If you care about high quality thinking about philanthropy, democracy and charitable giving in general, which I of course think you should, you should also be paying attention to some of Ben Soskis' other current writing. Here he is moderating a written discussion of Americans' giving capacity. And here's a piece about how the Soros conspiracy theories are damaging real debate about the role of large scale philanthropy in democratic societies.
In the spirit of the holidays, I feel like I should wrap up an item on philanthropy with some good news. In the last full edition of the faiV I mentioned the MacArthur Foundation's 100&Change initiative, which is picking one idea to get $100 million to "solve" a problem. For all the problems I have with that, the program is doing something really interesting, thanks to Brad Smith and the Foundation Center. All of the proposals, not just the finalists, are now publicly available for other foundations to review.

Read More

Week of September 11, 2017

1. Digital Finance: There's a regular theme I hit when it comes to digital finance--digital gives much more power to providers, government or private sector, than physical cash does. And that is something we should worry about. So my confirmation bias when into overdrive when this crossed my feed this week: China is detaining ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang Province and one of the criteria for detention is people who "did not use their mobile phone after registering it." Brett Scott objects to cashlessness for both its inherent nature as a tool of surveillance and for more pecuniary reasons: unlike cash, every digital transaction generates fees. Which in turn gives power to the organizations that have a seemingly insatiable appetite for categorizing and controlling people. Hey, ever wonder why Facebook is pushing hard into payments, even into fundraising for non-profits?

Scott uses Sweden's progress toward cashlessness as a foil. Want to guess which other country beyond China and Sweden has made the most progress toward digital-only payments? Somaliland. Huh. Elsewhere, the progress of digital finance seems to have slowed to a crawl: 76% of mobile money accounts are dormant, and the average active user only conducts 2.9 transactions a month. Perhaps that's because of a huge gap in usability that will require a similarly large push in education (according to Sanjay Sinha).

Given the near unrelenting negativity above, I feel like I have to say for the record: I don't oppose digitisation. I oppose not recognizing and planning for the negative consequences of digitisation.

2. Global Finance: Digital finance and mobile money is generally about very local transactions. But another important use is long-distance transactions, particularly remittances. But international transfers of funds require banks to have relationships that cross borders. The technical term is "correspondent banks." What correspondent banks do is vastly simplify and accelerate the flow of funds across borders. So it's a problem that correspondent banking relationships are shutting down as a result of "de-risking," which is banking jargon for "avoiding anything that may draw the attention of regulators who have the somewhat arbitrary ability to impose massive fines." The IFC reports that more than a quarter of banks responding to their survey reported losing correspondent bank relationships with compliance costs the most common reason; and 78% expected compliance costs to increase substantially for 2017.

And now for a bit of levity, if you can call it that. Matt Levine has the incredible story of how the Batista brothers, owners of a large Brazilian meat-packing company, made money shorting the Brazilian Real--they knew recordings of their conversations with President Michel Temer about bribes were going to be released. Is that insider trading?

3. US Poverty and Inequality: This week the US Census Bureau released its report on income and poverty in the United States in 2016. The new was good, at least on a relative basis: incomes are growing across the board and poverty is down. But...the majority of gains are still going to upper income groups, and inequality continues to rise as a result. The bottom half of the distribution is only now getting back to where it was in 1999 or earlier. Here's Sheldon Danziger's take on the data and the policy implications. The Economic Progress Institute has a good overview (with good charts) of the poverty data specifically, which focuses on how safety net programs reduce the number of people below poverty by "tens of millions."

The 8+ million who are above the Supplmental Poverty Measure threshold because of refundable tax credits (e.g. the EITC and the Child Tax Credit) particularly caught my eye because of this profile of a US Financial Diaries household that I just finished. Amy Cox, for the year we followed her, is one of those people. For the year, she is above the SPM because of tax credits. But she receives all of that in one lump sum in February. So for 11 months of the year, she's poor. In 9 months of the year, she's around 75% of the SPM threshold. But officially, she's not poor. Makes me think it's time for a Supplemental Supplemental Poverty Measure that takes into account how many weeks a year someone is below the line.

In other US Financial Diaries news, here's Jonathan Morduch speaking about Steady Jobs without Steady Pay at TEDxWilmington this week (skip ahead to 1:30:00).

Read More

Week of May 1, 2017

1. Households Matter!:  If you've followed research on microfinance at all, you've probably come across work by de Mel, McKenzie and Woodruff about giving cash grants to microenterprises (in Sri Lanka and Ghana), finding that the returns to investment in women's firms is much lower (and close to 0) than in men's enterprises. It's a bit of puzzle for several reasons (e.g. why do women borrow if their returns are so low, and why don't men borrow more if their returns are so high?) and there have been various explanations tried out (you can see one of mine in this paper). Bernhardt, Field, Pande and Rigol (paper here, overview from Markus Goldstein here) have a new one that seems pretty compelling based on reanalyzing data from several experiments, including the cash grant experiments. It's an explanation that points back to Gary Becker and Robert Townsend ideas (household's maximizing returns across the household assuming money is fully fungible) about how households work, and away from Viviana Zelizer's (money is often not, in fact, fungible and different income streams in the household are treated differently) or in some ways against Yunus's idea of focusing on women. Bernhardt et al. see that in general when it appears that when women's enterprises show little or no return to capital it's often because the household has another microenterprise that the capital is invested in instead--and those enterprises (where data is available) show gains from the capital injection into the household. When women own the only microenterprise in the household, they see returns (and are often in similar industries) as men. 

This is a big deal and it emphasizes how far we still have to go in understanding household finance. This doesn't say that Zelizer's insights are wrong--they are clearly right in lots of cases--but we don't have a solid grasp on when we should think of households as a single utility-maximizing unit and when we should disaggregate.

2. Pre-K Matters? (and other scale-ups): One of the things that households--or if you read some of the charity marketing that has dominated the last decade or so, only women--invest in is their children's education. Unfortunately, it seems that they often under-invest in education and so a lot of effort is invested in getting children into and keeping them in school. In the United States, the current frontier is about universal Pre-K since most every child is enrolled through the beginning of secondary school. The idea is that children from poorer households start school already well behind their wealthier peers, those gaps persist and if we close them early, well the gaps will stay closed. There are some studies that suggest that's true and Jim Heckman in particular among economists has been a big advocate of significantly increasing investment in early childhood education programs. But there are other studies that suggest it's not. I called the arguments on this "Pre-K" wars in my book because a lot of the argument has been over experimental design and methodological issues in the studies.

Russ Whitehurst at Brookings has a new post on the Pre-K wars that I learned a lot from, including new data from Tennessee that shows the returns from pre-K there were negative and the randomization in the famous Abecedarian study was violated in ways that are impossible to correct for. The bottom line for Whitehurst is that while small-scale, intensive interventions with very high-skill staff can make a big difference, programs at scale don't have any solid evidence they work. Which sounds a lot like some of the things we're seeing from scale up of successful programs in other areas of development.

Read More

Week of April 17, 2017

1. FinTech Like a State:  Aadhaar, the Indian government's unique identifier system, is now ubiquitous with 99% of citizens over 18 having an ID. That makes it a powerful platform for delivering both government programs and digital financial services. But it also raises a lot of concerns about what the government might do--or what others could do if they gain access to or corrupt the system--when it can track and/or regulate citizen behavior at a detailed level. That certainly plays into the longer-term ramifications of Indian demonetization, especially since it appears that it has driven many more people to digital transactions. CGD held an event this week with Annie Lowery interviewing Arvind Subramanian about Aadhaar, demonetization and universal basic income. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet, so I don't know whether my pre-submitted question was asked, "Which governments should be trusted with the power to deny people the ability to transact legally?"

And for some reason I feel like this piece, nominally about why Silicon Valley keeps getting biotechnology wrong, is really about FinTech.

2. Financial Literacy Like A State (University): "Shut Up About Financial Literacy" says Sara Goldrick-Rab contemplating how higher education institutions blame a lack of financial literacy for the problems students have paying for college. Here's Helaine Olen documenting the head of Penn State University's FinLit program saying: "The real problem is not the rising cost of education, it is in the... lack of financial literacy..." Goldrick-Rab cites a new paper from Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton (and here's a Chronicle of Higher Education write-up) making the case that the financial literacy movement as a whole tends to blame the victim rather than acknowledging that many of the choices that look like "low financial literacy" are in fact choices born of poverty and the racial wealth gap. That's a key element of Scott's Seeing Like A State: The drive to solve problems at scale often leads to simplified measurement systems that obscure important distinctions, or miss reality altogether, and ultimately reinforce the problems they are meant to address or create worse ones.

3. Financial Services Regulation: You pretty much have to do financial services regulation like a state. In the United States one of the main financial regulators is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). This week we learned that the OCC had received more than 700 whistleblower complaints about Wells Fargo's practice of opening accounts without customer knowledge or consent, but did nothing. Well not quite nothing. Matt Levine points to part of the OCC's report where it admits it focused too much on process and not enough on outcomes: "You spend so much time making sure that there are processes to stop bad things that you forget to actually stop the bad things." [You have to scroll past the amazing JuiceTech story] That's certainly another part of seeing like a state. And it's a particular concern when you get isomorphic mimicry, in Lant Pritchett's application, of financial services regulation.
On the bright side, I worry a bit less about the progress of our algorithmic overlords when apparently none of the deep learning programs noticed that videos about Wells Fargo like this or this (and many, many, many others) have been on YouTube since at least 2010. But then there's also this about how United's algorithms led to it's disastrous decision-making.

Read More

Week of April 10, 2017

1. Social Investment Dissent:  Last week I had an item about "social investment wars"--unfortunately Felix Salmon's critical take ("How Not to Invest $1 Billion") on the Ford Foundation's announcement came out just a bit too late to be included. It does pair nicely with a video of Xav Briggs of the Ford Foundation talking about the decision and the future of impact investing.
In the item last week I criticized the sector for not acknowledging trade-offs, principal-agent problems and the like. To be fair, there are people in the sector talking about these issues. Here's a piece from Omidyar Network staff in SSIR about a "returns continuum" rather than "no tradeoffs." Here's a piece from Ceniarth staff concurring. And there are two recent pieces from the CFI blog on responsible exits from social investments: first, pointing out that who a social investor sells to should be part of the impact calculation, and second making an important point about the "missing middle" in social investment (though they don't use that term).

The missing middle they are pointing out is investors who are willing to buy on the secondary market but maintain social goals. This echoes a long-standing problem in foundation philanthropy: most large foundations want to be first movers and believe that there are "followers" who will come after them to support organizations or programs after the initial grants. It seems in both cases, the followers just don't meaningfully exist. 

2. Financial Literacy: April is financial literacy month in the United States at least. I continue to use financial literacy as my barometer for the evidence-based policy movement: if evidence isn't making an impact here, why should we expect to have an influence elsewhere? But on to the links. Here's perhaps the dumbest idea currently circulating--making financial literacy a requirement for high school graduation. Here's Graham Wright de-mythifying financial education in the developing world. And on a brighter note, here is IPA's review of what's been learned from impact evaluations of financial literacy programs around the world (it's not just "they don't work!"). 

3. The Technology of Management: Having written a couple of books about Toyota, this is a particular fascination of mine--and of course I therefore think other people should be paying more attention to it. Management matters a lot to firm performance (explaining about 20% of firm-to-firm productivity gaps), which in turn matters a lot to wages and job creation/growth. Here's Nick Bloom in Harvard Business Review on rising firm inequality. Here's Bloom et al. on why the technology of management diverges (or alternatively, doesn't converge as much as expected given the returns).

Read More

Week of April 3, 2017

1. Cash vs Chickens Wars:  Within development circles, the most widely read point/counterpoint began with Chris Blattman's piece in Vox, written almost as a letter to Bill Gates. Blattman takes issue with Gates' idea to provide livestock, specifically chickens, to poor households and instead proposes a test of the benefit of just giving cash. To be clear Blattman isn't saying that cash is better, but that we don't know--and we do know that giving chickens is much more expensive (and everyone who's been involved in aid knows at least one story about how "the chickens all died")--so we should run a test and compare. Lant Pritchett responds on CGD's blog, saying in all his years in development, never once has the question of "chickens versus cash" arisen as a pressing question. One reason is that Pritchett believes the goal of development shouldn't be marginal improvements for the poorest but generating the kind of growth that has seen hundreds of millions escape poverty in China, Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries. Of course, Blattman responds and does a good job keeping the focus on what I would call the competing theories of change proposed by Chris and Lant. In fact, I have called it that, and if you're interested in a deeper dive into the issues in this debate, I know a good book you should read (or at least check out Marc Bellemare's and Jeff Bloem's review of it).

2. Mortality Wars: Those in the US policy community, on the other hand, have probably been too occupied following the "mortality wars" to even know there's a battle between cash and chickens happening next door. Here's the quick background: Anne Case and Angus Deaton have a new paper about mortality rates in the US--I would say more about their results but, of course, this wouldn't be a war if there wasn't vehement disagreement over what their results actually are. As with an earlier paper, Jonathan Auerbach and Andrew Gelman take issue particularly around the composition of Case's and Deaton's aggregate results, and provides charts decomposing mortality rates by race, gender and state. There are a lot of other critiques, including about the data visualization in Case's and Deaton's paper, but you can save yourself a lot of time by just reading Noah Smith's excellent post about the data and the debate which brings the attention squarely to where it should be: that mortality rates for white Americans stopped following the trajectory of other developed countries and a massive gap has opened up between the US and others. 
Then there's a secondary discussion of why this is happening and what it all means so here's some supplementary reading on that, courtesy of Jeff Guo at the Washington Post: An interview with Case and Deaton; "if white Americans are in crisis, what have black Americans been living through?"; and it's more than opioids. But if there's one related thing you aren't likely to read, but should, it's this article from Bloomberg on automobile manufacturing in the South.
This also seems like the best place to insert my favorite new aphorism: "Being a statistician means never having to say you are certain." (via Tim Harford)

Read More

Week of February 27, 2017

1. Mobile Money: The GSMA published it's annual mobile money "state of the industry" report, except that this time it's a review of the 2006-2016. Here's a summary (I know which one I would click on). As you'd expect, the GSMA heavily touts some impressive statistics on growth and usage. And I suppose you can't be surprised at the sometimes more than implied leaps from outputs to outcomes. But the more I look at things like this, the more I'm reminded of Lant Pritchett's book The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain't Learning and the history of using school enrollment as a very bad proxy for the outcome that everyone actually cares about, learning. Or to use a closer to the finance industry analogy, was there anyone tracking the spread of ATMs and debit cards and getting excited about how much it was going to help the poor?

2. The New Redlining: Fisman, Paravisini, and Vig have a new paper (and a summary) in AER on the effect of loan officer "cultural proximity" with borrowers in India. Loan officers who share religion, ethnicity and other traits with a borrower provide larger loans on better terms, and borrowers have higher repayment rates, meaning the loans are more profitable for the bank. The proposed mechanism is reduced "information frictions" in the lending process. It's a more subtle form of redlining--a systematic way that banks denied credit to minority communities in the United States. Fisman et. al. suggest hiring and promoting minority loan officers as the obvious way to combat the discrimination they document (that's a version of "immigrant" banks that you can still find in places like New York and San Francisco). It's also part of the reason that algorithmic approaches to credit, like this effort to use exam scores as a proxy for student lending in Kenya--remain appealing: you can simply skip past the bias inherent in human-to-human interactions! If only. The long battle against algorithmic redlining is only just beginning and will be much harder to win as long as we succumb to the fiction that algorithms fix bias. I wonder which socioeconomic class the people doing better on exams come from?

Read More