Editor's Note: TL;DR: The faiV has been missing because of a combination of launching a big new research project and some changes that we'll be making based on feedback from readers, but I'm back now.
Also, register here for the next faiVLive, "Accounting for the Gender Profit Gap" with Nava Ashraf, Morgan Hardy and others on March 2nd.
–Tim Ogden
Viewing all posts with tag: Microfinance
Week of September 14th, 2020
Editor's Note: Of particular note, this Tuesday (September 15th) at 10am Eastern there is a special edition of faiVLive in Spanish covering Digital Financial Services in Latin America. I'll be hosting with Gabriela Zapata moderating, and Kiki DelValle, Barbara Magnoni, and Xavier Faz will be joining us. Register here.
I apologize in advance if the final links on resilience undermine your resilience at the beginning of the week.
–Tim Ogden
Read MoreWeek of August 21st, 2020
Editor's Note: I feel like the typical "everyone is gone in August" thing hasn't been happening this year, but there is so much that's different that I can't really tell. And while I took some time off in July, and even went somewhere, it didn't feel like a vacation since there was still so much effort needed figuring out what the boys and I could do in a time of distancing and lockdowns. I hope you have had some time mentally away, but you know, not all of your time mentally away.
--Tim Ogden
Week of July 25th, 2020
Editor's Note: It's been a bit more than four years that I've been writing the faiV and though I probably haven't had as many links as minutes in a year, it's a safe bet that there have been more than 200 faiVs and 4000 links in that time. So I took a bit of an unannounced hiatus for the month. I hope you missed the faiV.
If you did, and you'd be interested in being part of a feedback panel that we are putting together to help us make decisions about the future of the faiV, please just respond to this email. And if you missed us but think the faiV is already perfect, feel free to respond to say that, but more importantly, please tell a few friends and colleagues to subscribe.
In public services announcements, there are a couple of research funding opportunities that may be of interest to you: a) UNESCAP has a new RFP for evidence-based interventions to support women entrepreneurs (in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Fiji, Nepal, Samoa, or Vietnam); and b) ANDE and the Canadian IDRC have a call for Expressions of Interest on studying the experiences of women in venture accelerators in Latin America and SSA.
--Tim Ogden
Read MoreDigital Financial Services, Inclusion, Exclusion and the Future of Pro-Poor FSPs
The pandemic has raised the profile of digital financial services, which have enabled amazingly rapid distribution of social support funds and may provide a path forward for delivering financial services safely and at scale. But there are important questions left to consider about the roll-out and ultimate impact of DFS. This edition of faiVLive brought together expert practitioners and researchers to address these questions, ranging from the impact of DFS on MFIs to digital security.
Read MoreWeek of May 11th, 2020
Editor's Note: I recently learned that my paper with Michael Clemens (that one I referred to last week that took 5 years from submission to publication) on rethinking migration from the perspective of household finance is among the top 10% of downloads at Development Policy Review so if you're eager to read something non-pandemic check it out. Apparently at least a few other people have done so. And the paper on what is happening with microcredit in Pakistan is now officially published.
–Tim Ogden
Read MoreMicrofinance and COVID-19
This edition of faiVLive brought together expert practitioners and researchers to discuss how we should be thinking about the impact of COVID-19 and pandemic control policies on poor households in developing countries, what policy interventions are plausible and possible, what role does microfinance have to play, and what needs to happen to enable the global microfinance industry to be useful now and six months from now.
Read MoreWeek of April 10th, 2020 (faiVLive)
This week’s edition of the faiV was a faiVLive — a webinar featuring a panel of experts discussing the impact of Covid-19 on MFI clients and other poor households.
About the Webinar
This edition of faiVLive brings together expert practitioners and researchers to discuss how we should be thinking about the impact of COVID-19 and pandemic control policies on poor households in developing countries, what policy interventions are plausible and possible, what role does microfinance have to play, and what needs to happen to enable the global microfinance industry to be useful now and six months from now.
Featuring
Shameran Abed, Senior Director of BRAC’s microfinance and ultrapoor graduation schemes
Greta Bull, CEO of CGAP and a director at the World Bank Group
Deborah Burand, Professor of Clinical Law at NYU and the Co-Director of the Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship
Neville Crawley, CEO at Kiva
Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at NYU-Wagner, and a founder and Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative
Stuart Rutherford, Leader of the Hrishipara Financial Diaries; founder and Chairman of Bangladeshi financial services co-operative SafeSave
Moderator
Timothy Ogden, Managing Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative
Support
This faiVLive is part of the Household Financial Security Insight Community, supported by the Mastercard Impact fund, and in collaboration with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.
Week of April 3, 2020
Editor's Note: The only two predictions I feel I confident in making right now are that a) we will find some new phrase for opening a conversation other than "How are you?" or at least some new way to answer the question, and b) that the trend of putting webcams on the bottom of a laptop screen is over. Thanks to all of you who reached out in reaction to the abbreviated version of the faiV last week focused on my concerns about the future of microfinance in the US and globally. Please keep sending information and thoughts my way.
Read MoreWeek of March 23, 2020
Editor’s Note: What a difference a month makes. I've started drafting a new edition of the faiV several times over the last six weeks, but events kept overwhelming the moment and I put it off again. Now it seems that events have overwhelmed everything. And so, here is a special edition of the faiV with few links and only two thoughts around one central theme: the existential crisis for microfinance globally.
Read MoreWeek of January 31, 2020
1. Financial Inclusion/Household Financial Security: It seems strange that I so infrequently have items specifically on microfinance so I leap at the chance when it comes along, particularly when that chance involves one of my soapboxes. For instance: the product is what the users make of it, not what the institution wants it to be. For instance, most microcredit loans aren't investment loans, they're liquidity management tools. Which, of course, makes sense since liquidity management is a more pressing need and the structure of the basic microcredit loan is so ill-suited to business investment. But there are ways to make the standard microcredit loan structure more workable for investment purposes. For instance, borrowers from the largest MFI in China form bogus groups and then funnel all of the loans to a single member to make a larger investment. It's not a niche phenomena either: the authors estimate that 73% of groups are doing this.
Another of my soapboxes is the history of development of financial institutions that serve excluded populations, and where the modern microfinance movement fits in that history. There's a new paper from Marvin Suesse and Nikolaus Wolf on the development rural credit cooperatives in Prussia between 1852 and 1913 (I did say this was a pet interest). And here's a summary version in VoxEU. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you would normally click on, I beg you to reconsider. It's an interesting story about what drove the creation of a new kind of financial services institution in a setting that makes it a bit easier to disentangle causes and effects, and what effect these new institutions had on their communities. I won't spoil the ending but would encourage you to think about how their results would look if measured with an individual-focused impact evaluation.
I will spoil the beginning, though: the formation of credit cooperatives was driven by changes in the economy that increased the need for access to credit. Which brings me to a third soapbox, the Great Convergence (and there's more on that below). Here's a new report from the New York Fed on constrained access to credit in the United States, including a "Credit Insecurity Index." The premise is that access to credit is important for households to manage liquidity, manage investment and manage risk (those are my terms, theirs are "manage emergencies, take advantage of opportunities, or invest"), but that access varies geographically for lots of different reasons. The report tracks 5 tiers of credit access and changes in those tiers over time, by county. There are 11 states where more than 10% of the population lives in credit-insecure counties. It's another way to illustrate how much in common parts of the US, geographically and demographically, have in common with middle-income countries. Speaking of, I'd love to see a similar exercise done in other countries.
Finally, and keeping with the Great Convergence sub-theme, here's a new paper from Jonathan Fu looking at representative data from six "emerging economies" and five "developed economies" to look at "contextual-level" predictors of financial well-being. He finds that more sources of independent information, more competition, and specifically more competition from informal and semi-formal providers helps, and that simple access and financial literacy don't (hey, another soapbox!).
2. Digital Finance: Writing about digital finance is frequently tough because the line between what is "finance" and what is "digital finance" isn't all that clear much of the time. Thirty years ago most credit card transactions were digital (the information was passed over phone lines from modem-to-modem!) but we don't tend to think of that as "digital finance." Another of my soapboxes is that often the "digital" in "digital finance" is used as a justification to pretend the rules of finance don't apply. Here's a useful review in an unusual outlet (Computer) on the "technical potential versus practical reality" of digital finance, specifically blockchain and crypto, for low-income people. It cites some examples I was unaware of and presents the arguments for the benefits pretty clearly. But the best reason to read it is the Challenges section features a heading you almost never see from pieces that emerge from the digital side of digital finance: "Low-income groups' limited power and financial/social capital." Another thing I really like is it draws a distinction between FinTechs and TechFins, the latter being tech firms dabbling in finance.
The Economist has a piece this week on that issue specifically: "how digital financial services can prey upon the poor" with a specific focus on the potential for abuse of data gathered on poor customers who have little understanding of what is being gathered by whom or the consequences (to be fair, none of us do). To the point about the blurred line between finance and digital finance, there's not much there that hasn't been true of non-digital finance for a very long time.
The Economist piece relies heavily on CGAPs long-standing attention to these issues, and Matthew Soursourian and Ariadne Plaitakis have more to add in a look at how digital finance may require changes to competition policy in financial services, specifically as TechFins play a larger role. Oh look, they specifically call out issues of political power!
In their case it's the political power that the market power of TechFins brings, but it's not just the political power of corporations that becomes worrisome in digital finance. The political power of governments is even more concerning to the extent that it enables even more channels for surveillance, oppression and exclusion. Here's a story about Kenya's digital ID initiative that is excluding many marginalized groups from getting the IDs that will soon be necessary for many aspects of life including access to the financial system. But even those people who are included may end up excluded because the government lacks the tools and expertise to protect the very sensitive data that goes into the biometric IDs.
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 MoreWeek of November 21, 2019
1. Microfinance: It's not often that I have a plain microfinance item these days, but there are some important specifically microfinance points of interest this week. First it's the 10th anniversary edition of the Microfinance Barometer. There's an interesting piece in it on the evolution of the Barometer's coverage, and one on "digitalisation: risk or opportunity?" which I automatically like because of the framing. Also, there's an article asking whether financial inclusion and microfinance are the same thing, which I was kind of taken aback by since I mostly hear these days about whether there is a meaningful and useful difference between inclusion and health. I didn't know anyone was still equating microfinance with inclusion. But perhaps the most interesting thing is a small snippet of data on Portfolio at Risk: the trend is definitely upward toward 7% PAR30, which is well above the historic range of "good practice" microcredit. Is it a sign of MFIs learning to take more risk? Or that they are being pressured by digital entrants to be more aggressive? Or something else?
This week the European Microfinance Platform released Financial Inclusion Compass 2019, the report on their annual survey of trends in financial inclusion (note, not trends in microfinance). You'll hear more about Compass in coming weeks as the eMFP team will be taking over the faiV one week soon. In my quick initial look through the thing I found most interesting is the divergence between how MFIs and investors are rating various issues. Specifically, MFIs still put human resources issues at the top of their list of concerns--it's still a problem attracting, training and retaining staff apparently. Which should raise questions of digital security: if MFIs can't retain basic banking staff, what hope do they have of attracting and retaining cybersecurity staff? (Yes, I'm going to keep banging on this drum for a long time to come.)
Speaking of digital finance, one more thing for this week: MicroSave's full report on the state of digital credit in Kenya is full of fascinating (and scary) details. Like, "Between 2016 and 2018, "86% of loans that Kenyans took were digital in nature." Yes, indeed, it sounds like the MFIs are under significant pressure. But so you don't think I'm letting my confirmation bias run totally rampant, here's a recent blog post from MicroSave highlighting the positive trends in digital credit in Kenya, which include rising loan quality (that is, if you consider repayment rates a pure measure of loan quality; sorry, not sorry). Especially since there is also a new report from FSDKenya "evaluating the conduct and practice of digital lending" there. It includes fun stories like relatives of borrowers being threatened with being blacklisted at credit agencies if they don't compel repayment. Loan quality is definitely improving.
2. Migration: Did I mention I have a new paper with Michael Clemens on reframing the migration research agenda? Oh yes, I'm sure I did, but nevertheless, here it is again.
But there is also some brand new stuff. First, here's a look at the impact of massive out-migration from Galicia since 1860. The initial outflow lowered literacy rates for about a decade but then the trend reversed with large gains in human capital at origin that have persisted for more than a century. The mechanism: both remittances from the migrants to fund education back in Galicia and the transmission of norms about the importance of education.
There's also a new study of the impact of the end of the Bracero program which allowed Mexicans to migrate for agricultural jobs in the United States beginning during World War II. When the program ended, there was a sudden massive drop in migrants. What happened? Well, awhile ago, Michael, Ethan Lewis and Hannah Postel had a paper showing there was no effect on employment or wages for native-born workers. This new paper by Muly San explains why: large investment in technology to reduce the labor needed to harvest the crops that Bracero's had been employed harvesting (and not in other crops.)
Drawing heavily on Michael's research there's also a new special report from The Economist making the case for more migration to make the world a better place. And it doesn't even include how migrants seem to be the best defenders America's institutions have right now.
And here's a story about how the huge inflow of Venezuelan refugees into Colombia has made it the fastest growing country on the continent--and apparently about the most stable country on the continent right now.
Meanwhile, if you're wondering what's wrong with America you're not alone. Here's a partial answer that I've featured before: Americans keep setting new records for immobility.
Week of November 12, 2019
1. Good Economics: I’m pretty jealous of the luck that the editor who signed Esther and Abhijit to write a new book with a big picture view of economics and development and managed to have it scheduled to come out just a few weeks after they won the Nobel has (or alternatively I’m not jealous at all of the eternity of suffering they will have from selling their soul to make this happen). It is pretty remarkable timing regardless of how it came about.
The official release isn't until later this week, but there’s already a good amount of stuff out there, and the book seems likely to generate a lot of conversation. Here’s an excerpt that outlines their perspective on migration (it’s good and there should be more of it). Here’s an excerpt of their perspective on trade (it’s not as good as you’ve heard). Here’s a thread from David McKenzie contrasting the two.
I’m told a review copy is headed my way, and if so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the book in future weeks.
2. Global Development: It feels like quite some time since I’ve been able to feature some big picture things happening in the development space. So here’s a round-up of some pretty diverse things on that front.
David Malpass has been in charge at the World Bank for long enough to start seeing some changes. Here’s a perspective on how the annual meetings were different this time around. And here’s a piece on how Malpass seems to be trying to shift toward more attention at the individual country level than on global or regional issues. I guess no one will be surprised if the Bank does little on the climate change front while he is in charge.
It’s been well more than a decade of pretty remarkable economic growth on average in sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries that has meant substantial progress on reducing poverty headcounts; in others not so much. Via Ken Opalo here’s a paper that proposes an explanation for the pretty bi-modal distribution of countries that have made progress on poverty and those that haven’t. Spoiler: Acemoglu and Robinson and those who like path dependence stories probably agree.
Bolivia is in crisis right now with real uncertainty about what the next few weeks, much less months, will hold. It would be interesting to see a systematic review of outcomes for countries where there have been coups and ones where there's been "sort of" a coup. But Bolivia is in remarkably better shape than some of the other countries in Latin America that elected populist lefitsts around the same time. Here’s a Twitter conversation between Justin Sandefur, Dany Bahar and Alice Evans (and later Pseudoerasmus weighs in) on the pretty unique set of economic policies and macro-conditions that account for that.
China’s efforts to play a large role in developing countries has been a topic for awhile now. But there’s still a lot of questions about what exactly China’s influence and impact on developing countries will be. Here’s a CGD piece on what the Belt and Road Initiative will look like in 10 years.
Russia is the new scary story in African "investment." A few weeks ago Russia hosted a summit with leaders of African countries. So what does Russian involvement in Africa look like? Here's a claim that Russia is sending mercenaries to Libya with the intention of increasing migrant flows to Europe to destabilize countries there. What are the chances that the Banerjee and Duflo chapter on migration will be wildly influential and cause the Russian strategy to backfire?
On the migration front, here’s Michael Clemens and Jimmy Graham on how demographics are going to change the flows of migrants to the United States from Central America--I don’t think they factor in the possible impact of Russian mercenaries.
3. Digital Finance: Here are some important stories about digital finance that you may not have noticed. If that sounds like a familiar opening, well, yes, OK, I’m going to hammer on this theme for a bit--be prepared it’s likely to be a regular fixture, at least until I feel like it’s gets regular enough attention in conversations about fintech, mobile money and other things digital.
Nikkei--the Japanese financial news organization and owner of the FT--lost $29 million in a phishing scam. UniCredit--the Italian bank--exposed 3 million customer records in a data breach. Web.com, one of the largest domain name registrars in the world, was hacked a few weeks ago and exposed 22 million records. What'sApp was also hacked, apparently by an Israeli firm that proceeded to spy on 1400 people in 20 countries.
Anyone feeling confident that microfinance institutions or even major mobile money providers are really immune to these security breaches that are affecting even highly sophisticated companies spending multi-millions on cybersecurity? If you are, please print out this tweet and tape it to your monitor.
OK, here's something not on the security question: a paper on the economic effects of money based on Spanish history: whether or not shipments of silver made it back to Spain from the New World had a big impact on the literal supply of money. So what does this have to do with digital finance? I think it's a useful explanation for the Jack and Suri finding about the growth effects of mobile money in Kenya.
Week of October 18, 2019
1. Nobel Prizes: It's a little weird writing about the Nobel going to Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer in the faiV--this is mostly stuff we cover all the time, and it's probably not news at this point to anyone who cares. So it's not entirely clear what to write. But here goes.
First, I have to point out that 1 in 5 people I interviewed for my book have gone on to win a Nobel. So any of you who aspire to future laureate status should probably make time for me (Yes, I'm talking to you Sendhil). All I'm saying is that both an event study or an RDD would show strong indications of causality. Given that my ability to predict the winner of the prize also is remarkable, wouldn't you say now is a great time to recommend subscribing to the faiV to all of your friends?
More seriously, I suppose I should link to some of the responses. From the "pro" camp here's Karthik Muralidharan and here's Pam Jakiela who notes that Esther is the first woman with an economics Ph.D. to win (Elinor Ostrom's Ph.D was in political science) while also noting the quite different family structure of this set of winners in comparison to many in the past (though not, it should be noted, the other Nobelist who won after appearing in my book, Angus Deaton). Here's Tim Harford, who unusually, quickly shifts the focus to Kremer's O-ring theory. On the more neutral side, here's Maitreesh Ghatak.
There's a critical side as well. For example, here's Duvendack, Jolly, Mader and Morvant-Roux on how the prize reveals the "poverty of economics." And here's Grieve Chelwa and Sean Muller with "the poverty of poor economics." I have serious issues with both of these. The Duvendack et al. piece seems to intimate that Esther and Abhijit were pro-microcredit and tried to rescue the sectors reputation from their unexpected results. That is just bizarre--the title of their paper "The Miracle of Microfinance" could be better described as an intemperate twisting of the knife; that's certainly how the microfinance industry felt. Chelwa and Muller accuse the randomistas of "imitating" science but not doing it--which can only mean they are paying very little attention to what happens in other domains of science. Here's a Twitter thread of response to Chelwa and Muller from Oyebola Okunogbe. As Okunogbe points out while pushing back, each of the essays make some good and reasonable points, which is part of what makes the critiques of the RCT movement so maddening: the blending of good points with silly ones blunts the impact of the critics, in my opinion.
Now if you're interested in a long and more balanced, but still critical (in the better, broader sense) take, here's Kevin Bryan's overview at A Fine Theorem.
The next big question for me is what comes next for the RCT movement and it's critics. There are several possible futures. One is that the prize permanently solidifies the value of RCT movement and allows more constructive engagement by proponents with critics since the randomistas no longer have to worry about an existential threat to their work and legacy. Another is that the critics will realize that their long rearguard campaign against the movement has been lost, and rather than devoting energy to grand sweeping critiques of the movement as a whole, will focus on more specific critiques of individual studies, designs, interpretations and findings and the application of research to policy, yielding better overall outcomes. And of course, there is the possibility that this changes nothing and we'll be still be having these same conversations about the use or uselessness of randomized trials in development economics 10 and 20 years from now.
2. Migration: It's here, at long last. Something like 7 years ago, I was talking with Michael Clemens about households, finances, migration and remittances. We got ourselves in a good dudgeon about the way most research approached remittances and agreed we should write a paper about re-conceiving migration as an investment and remittances as a cash flow return on that investment. It took us, I think, about 2 years to actually write the thing. That version turned into a couple of Lego stop motion videos--it was a weird time in the development internet back then--and we submitted it to a journal. Then, 5 years later we got a response. I'm not kidding.
But there's a happy ending. We were invited to revise and update (there was of course a lot to update after 5 years) and re-submit. And this week the finished product is finally published: Migration and Household Finances: How a Different Framing Can Improve Thinking About Migration (though I'll keep thinking of it as "Migration as a Household Finance Strategy").
And since Michael is so prolific on questions of migration, here's a thread from this week, with papers, on the old argument that physically coercing people to stay where they are is justifiable. (Spoiler: it's not).
3. US Inequality: Since the US Financial Diaries, a common refrain around here has been the hidden dimensions of inequality in the US--not just the easily quantifiable things like income or wealth, but the life and work circumstances that amplify and entrench income and wealth inequality. Things like irregular work schedules.
Kristen Harknett and Danny Schneider have been investigating the prevalence and impact of irregular work schedules for a few years. Earlier this year they had a paper about the consequences of irregular schedules on worker health and well-being. They have a new report out on how schedule irregularity "matters for workers, families and racial inequality." Here's an overview of their whole research program with links to other papers, and a very consumable summary from the Center for Equitable Growth.
I mentioned the strange times a few years ago as we all struggled with how to use the tools the internet was serving up to us to better communicate research and ideas. I have to say I'm impressed by the what is in evidence here in the partnership between Harknett and Schneider and the Center for Equitable Growth to get these ideas out through multiple channels.
On not just a US inequality note, I'll be at the Global Inclusive Growth Summit hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and the Aspen Institute on Monday and a Center event on driving financial security at scale on Tuesday. If any faiV readers will be there, be sure to say hello.
Week of October 11, 2019
1. Microfinance: October 2nd was the 10th anniversary of what I consider to be an underappreciated but critical moment in the history of the microfinance movement--David Roodman's piece on how Kiva actually worked. David had already been working on a book about microfinance that was going to be very influential--his open book blog as a whole is a remarkable contribution to the public good, one I wish many more people had decided to replicate--but the Kiva post (based on it being one of the most read blog posts in CGD history according to Justin Sandefur) brought a huge amount of attention to questions about how not only Kiva, but microfinance as a whole, actually worked. I re-read it this week and it's as good as I remember it and definitely makes me pine for the brief glorious time where the development blogosphere was a thing.
There's another important anniversary this week for global microfinance though with a less arbitrarily neat number--Muhammad Yunus's Peace Prize was 13 years ago. Today many were surprised that Greta Thunberg didn't win. The explanation seeming to be both timing and the fact that there is not a direct link between climate change and conflict. There may be a narrowing of the scope of the Peace Prize given that there is certainly no connection between microcredit and reduced conflict. In case you didn't know the winner was Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, who has done some pretty impressive things directly related to peace, like ending the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia and freeing thousands of political prisoners. For what it's worth the Economics Nobel announcement is Monday so expect to see more about that in next week's faiV. Some favorites with particular applicability to the faiV include some combination of Donald Rubin, Josh Angrist, John List and Guido Imbens for kicking off "the credibility revolution" and Michael Kremer, Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Duflo and/or John List for kicking off the experimental revolution. Of course, I'm hoping for the latter because it would likely give a pretty significant boost to my book sales.
But back to microfinance. Banerjee, Emily Breza, Townsend and Vera-Cossio have a new paper (presented at NEUDC) that uses the Townsend Thai village data and the expansion of a credit program to further bolster what should be the clear consensus on the effect of microcredit: on average not much, but very high returns for some. In this case, they find that there are very large gains for high productivity households who get access to credit (1.5 baht increase in profits for every 1 baht increase in credit) and even higher for those outside agriculture. This is broadly similar to earlier work, now in an NBER paper form, by Banerjee, Breza, Duflo and Cynthia Kinnan on Indian microfinance. Keep in mind, as we continue to see these results, that there is another side of the coin: is there a business model that can reach the high productivity borrowers more exclusively?
2. Inequality: If you think about within-country inequality, you think about taxes. Since the United States has had a huge explosion of income and wealth inequality in the last few decades, and there is a presidential election (hopefully) just over a year away there is a lot of discussion about the US tax system and how it has contributed to the growth of inequality and how it might be used to reduce it. This week there has been a lot of focus particularly on whether the US tax system is progressive or regressive, which seems intuitively like it should be a pretty straightforward question to answer. But the US tax system is so complicated, including not only collecting but distributing cash, it's a controversial question. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make the case that since the 1950s the US tax system has shifted dramatically toward being regressive. Here's David Leonhardt's shorter version of their argument with cool animated graphics. But not everyone agrees and those differences can't be traced just to ideology. Here's a thread from Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Obama debating Zucman on methodology and interpretation. Here's David Splinter with a more in-depth analysis illustrating why Saez and Zucman get such different numbers than the traditional approaches to analyzing progressivity.
Meanwhile, there is an entirely different question about whether taxes can be used to effectively address inequality (Saez and Zucman's book is all about how the wealthy evade taxes). There's a new NBER paper on the response of rich taxpayers to an increase in the California tax rate. It finds that just under 1% of those subject to the higher taxes moved out of state, and those who stayed found ways to avoid the tax, so that total income from the tax was about half of what it would have been otherwise. Here's Lyman Stone's Twitter summary.
It's not clear how to think about that 50% cut in additional revenue: on the one hand, there is a big increase in tax collection, on the other hand you have to expect that over time people are going to get even better at evading the tax. Here's Lily Batchelder and David Kamin with a comprehensive review of wealth taxation in implementation with hope that wealth taxes can work.
Week of September 27, 2019
1. Jobs: I've written a good bit here on the "Great Convergence" from the perspective of financial inclusion--that the US and middle-income countries have more in common in that domain than they have ever had--but another version of the "Great Convergence" is the common focus on jobs in countries across the per-capita income spectrum.
It's useful to put the current convergence in historical perspective--the recognition that creating jobs was critical and that "national champion" industrial development was not creating them played a large role in the development of the microfinance movement. The failure of microcredit to produce much beyond self-employment alternatives to casual labor has brought job creation, and especially job creation through SMEs, back to the top of the agenda of international development. At the same time, the failure of richer economies to produce very many "quality" jobs in the 10 years since the Great Recession (and arguably since the 1970s) or for the foreseeable future has put the question of jobs at the top of the list of concerns for policymakers in those countries.
Paddy Carter, the director of research for CDC (UK, not US), and Petr Sedlacek have a new report on how DFIs and social investors should think about job creation that lays out some of the issues (e.g. boosting productivity can both create and destroy jobs) quite nicely. MIT's "Work of the Future Task Force" also has a new report, this more from the perspective of policymakers in wealthier countries, with a call to focus on job quality more than job quantity. Stephen Greenhouse has a new book on dignity at work, which of course has a lot to do with job quality. Here's a talk he gave recently at Aspen's Economic Opportunities Program.
Seema Jayachandran has a new working paper on a specific part of the jobs conversation: how social norms limit women's labor market participation and what might be done about that. For me it also opens the question about microcredit-driven self-employment being a higher "dignity" job for women in many contexts than the jobs that are available to them otherwise. More on that in a moment.
2. Household Finance: I don't have a lot of links here, just some thoughts from conversations in the last few days. But to kick things off, Felix Salmon had a nice gibe at financial literacy this week that had my confirmation bias going. But in hindsight, I actually disagree: teaching financial literacy actually doesn't seem to be that hard based on the many papers that show that running a class leads to passing a financial literacy test. The hard part is making higher financial literacy pay off in terms of changed behavior. But there I agree with Felix's basic point: higher financial literacy doesn't lead to improved decision making for the poor or the wealthy. The wealthy just have more structure and protection (both formal in terms of regulation and practices at private firms who know better than to routinely screw profitable customers, and informal in terms of slack and cushion) from bad choices. On the flip side, Joshua Goodman has a new paper in the Journal of Labor Economics that finds that more compulsory high school math leads African-American students to complete more math coursework and to higher paying jobs (there's a nice little estimate that the return to additional math courses makes up half of the gains from an additional year of school).
Part one of "more on that in a moment" is that Seema with a rockstar list of development economists (Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer Moore) has another new paper on whether access to, deposits into and training on using a personal bank account affects women's labor supply and gender norms. They find that it does increase women's labor supply and shifts norms to be more accepting of women working. Here's the indispensible Lyman Stone with a somewhat skeptical take on the interpretation of the data.
Finally, in a conversation with Northern Trust this week about their financial coaching work (see a recent summary here) a really fascinating insight came up: people in the coaching programs seem to have much more success when "saving" is framed as "debt reduction" than when it's framed as "saving." These sort of things always grab my attention because Jonathan's paper Borrowing to Save was a seminal piece for my interest and thinking in financial inclusion. But it also got me thinking: what would happen if retirement savings programs were framed as debt + loss aversion? Specifically, if when you started a job, the employer said: "I'm loaning you $10K, deposited into an IRA and you owe me $x monthly, until you pay it off--and if you don't I take it back." Obviously you couldn't run an experiment like that in the US because of regulations, but is there somewhere you could? Maybe someone has already done it? Let me know if you have any thoughts.
Week of September 13, 2019
1. Digital Finance: Is a tide turning on digital credit? Old hands in the microfinance world like MicroSave and CGAP have been highlighting concerns about digital credit for the last few years, but the non-specialist community hasn't seemed to notice until recently. In late August Bloomberg had a quick hit piece with an eyebrow-raising headline, "This Nobel-Prize Winning Idea is Instead Piling Debt on Millions," which is likely the way the general public will perceive this despite the protests of insiders that telecoms/fintechs making instant loans at high rates with minimal customer engagement doesn't have much in common with traditional microcredit. A more serious treatment,"Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah" was published in the Boston Review the same week, though it's frustrating in its own ways, notably the lack of engagement with the global/historical context of small dollar lending or with the research from financial diaries.
In both articles there are two additional issues that I wish received more attention. First, the value of liquidity management. The authors of the Boston Review piece, Emma Park and Kevin Donovan (both historian/anthropologists), spend a good deal of time talking about the "zero-balance economy" creating a situation where consumers can be exploited without engaging on the need for services to manage liquidity when you have low and volatile incomes. Second, the kind of default rates being hinted at in these articles raise serious questions about the business models and sustainability of digital lenders. Tala, one of the larger digital credit providers in Kenya (and elsewhere) just raised another $110 million. How much of that money is covering losses? I would love to see some analysis of what sustainable default rates are for digital credit.
Shifting gears a bit, the reason that the Kenya specifically and East Africa more generally remain in the spotlight on digital finance is the ubiquity of access. But ubiquity can't be assumed and in general I would say not enough attention is being paid to what happens when ubiquity fails. Here I don't mean places where everyone knows service is unreliable, but places and times where service is unexpectedly unavailable. Here's a story about the problems that can create in the US with ZipCar customers stranded in the "wilderness" because of a lack of signal leaves them unable to unlock or start the vehicles. More seriously, though, is the concern when access is limited because of political reasons. Here's a story about the rise in government-directed internet shutdowns. Of course there is the big concern of how these shutdowns would affect people who have adopted digital finance and find themselves unable to spend. But I also wonder if Tala investors have priced in the risk to the business model of internet shutdowns.
Internet shutdowns are a blunt tool. We should also be concerned about more fine-grained tools in the hands of governments or private companies. I'm old enough to remember when one of the highlighted "benefits" of digital finance was that it created an audit trail of transactions. Here's a story about how much data about you leaks to unknown parts of the internet when you use the Amazon Prime card and the Apple Card. And finally, here's a new report on cash as a public good from IMTFI, sponsored by the International Currency Association, which I am fascinated to discover exists (though I'm even more fascinated to discover the International Banknote Designers Association, which is one of its members).
2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: There is of course a lot of overlap between concerns about digital finance and privacy and digital everything and privacy. One of the standard mantras of those gathering and selling data is that much of it is anonymized, so we shouldn't be concerned. But, of course, not so much. That's not just a concern in the US, because digital data-gathering is becoming a thing worldwide. Here's a plea to stop "stop surveillance humanitarianism." And here's a story about how a high-tech surveillance approach to improving disaster response turns out to have not been such a good idea (spoiler: garbage in/garbage out).
One of the major concerns about the use of algorithms in these situations is the garbage in/garbage out problem--combined with the gee-whiz veneer that technology provides obscuring that problem. I'm generally skeptical of that argument as a whole, because my experience is that people are far less likely to trust an algorithm than a human being (In some sense I wrote a whole book about it in a different application: the bogus fears that Toyotas were suddenly accelerating and trying to kill people). But there are other forms that algorithmic discrimination can take. Here's a story about a new US Housing and Urban Development regulation that would exempt landlords from responsibility for the discriminatory results of their screening practices as long as they don't understand the algorithm, which y'know is a given.
Finally, there is a new documentary about the 2016 US election, the Brexit referendum, Facebook/Cambridge Analytica, etc. called The Great Hack. Here's a piece about 7 things the documentary gets wrong which I find pretty convincing.
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.
Week of July 26, 2019
1. MicroDigitalFinance: The nominal intention of the faiV is to keep you aware of what's happening in various domains, especially microfinance. But there is a more systematic approach to documenting trends in the industry, e-MFPs survey of people in the industry on what they perceive to be the most important trends and developments. Here's their report from last year's survey. This year's survey is now open--so click here (French; Spanish) and go produce some data on trends in the industry.
There's some new experimental evidence on the impact of mobile money from Christina Weiser, Miriam Bruhn and co-authors, who managed to work with Airtel to randomize the expansion of mobile money agents in Northern Uganda. The findings, to my eye, are broadly similar to Jack and Suri's work in Kenya (keep that in mind, we'll be coming back to it later), though without the direct impact on income poverty.
And here's a report from Karandaaz Pakistan on the regulatory and policy bottlenecks limiting the spread of digital financial services there. The basic issue is a lack of clear policy and regulation, rather than existing policies that prevent action--which raises a question of why the lack of clear policy and regulation was a boon to digital financial services development in so many places, but a hindrance in others.
2. Digital Security: One of the areas the report on Pakistan highlights is lack of clarity on data privacy and protection, but mostly from the compliance side. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is the other side of digital security and the huge burden we are rapidly putting on individuals and firms to protect themselves from bad actors.
I'll admit this is somewhat driven by personal anecdote--I've spent a good bit of time over the last few weeks helping my in-laws recover after falling for one of the "Microsoft" security alert scams. These are older folks, obviously, but both are highly educated, experienced professional people--and they found it completely plausible that Microsoft had a customer service department that was monitoring their computers and helping protect them. Which is not a crazy thing to think, unless you've spent most of your life living in an era where digital service providers have effectively declaimed all responsibility for the damage using their products could do.
But apply this more broadly to people and institutions. As digital financial services spread, we are asking essentially the entire world to become immediately savvy about what a plausible claim is in the digital world. Google and Firefox and other browser providers who have policies and authorized "stores" for browser extensions actually enforce those policies right? Ha, ha, no, of course not, why would you think that? If you get a call from travel agent to book your accommodation at the conference you have been invited to give a keynote at, that's safe right? I mean, how would some scammer know that you're the keynote speaker and the right dates, etc. No of course that's a scam too.
But individuals aside, institutions should have the expertise to protect themselves. Unless it's say, local governments who keep being compromised by ransomware. Or you know, institutions that don't deal with anything particularly crucial, like say, elections.
But the old adage is that "banks" will be the most attacked targets because that is where the money is. Here's an interview with the former CEO of Thomson Reuters and now founder of a digital security company that touches on some important points, especially for financial services providers that aren't behemoths. Here's a blog post about how you can't "hire enough people to fix your cybersecurity problems." The nominal solution is to hire data scientists, which while great for the job market prospects of future economics PhD cohorts, isn't much of an answer for most organizations. How on earth are microfinance institutions going to be able to secure their digital infrastructure?
The bottom line on all of this for me is simply this: we pushed digital financial services as a way of pushing down transaction costs but it seems increasingly likely that if we add up the costs of keeping up with technology and ensuring digital security, we actually radically increased total cost.
3. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Digital security is even more of a concern because of our algorithmic overlords--I keep picturing the movie Brazil, which a minor change to data triggers an unstoppable set of processes, ruining a man's life. It was conceived in an era where those processes were totalitarian/bureaucratic; it's all the more plausible today when those processes are automatic.
What does the age of algorithmic control mean for how governments make decisions. Here's video of a session on that topic from the Institute for Government's recent conference featuring Sendhil Mullainathan and Rachel Glennerster. Rachel makes the point that decision rules hidden by machine learning and algorithms are a big problem for good governance.