1. FinLit Redux: A few weeks ago I had an op-ed in the Washington Post bemoaning the ongoing emphasis on financial literacy training. David Evans had an issue with one particular sentence in that op-ed, not about financial literacy, but about the effectiveness of information interventions. Here's his list of 10 studies where providing information (alone) changes behavior. And I suppose my inclusion of this is another piece of evidence supporting his point? On the other hand, here's a long, rambling essay from the president of the (US) National Foundation for Financial Education which is one of the finest examples I've ever seen of not just moving the goalposts but denying they even exist. He's got all the greatest hits: don't evaluate based on current practice because we're changing; don't evaluate based on average practice, because of course there are bad programs; don't evaluate based on standard measures because programs vary; don't pay attention to negative stories because they are "old and tired"; and even, "hey look over there!" Is there an emoji for scream of helpless rage?
The reason I find such defenses so enraging is because the huge amount of resources being poured into financial literacy could be put to so much better use that actually are likely to help people. Here's a piece looking at one of the specific trade-offs: financial literacy distracts from the very real need to protect consumers from bad actors. That's not just theoretical. The (US) CFPB is actually shifting from consumer protection to education. Where's that scream of helpless rage emoji again?
2. Household Finance and Regulation: Thinking about consumer protection and the role and value of financial literacy requires thinking about household finance. Fred Wherry, Kristin Seefeldt and Anthony Alvarez have a short essay on how to think about these issues, with several sentences I wish I had written, including, "Stop treating the borrowers as if they are ignorant or irresponsible. And start treating the lenders as if they are inefficient (and sometimes malicious) providers of needed financial services."
There is a tension there, however, that I think too often gets short shrift. Consumer protection regulation necessarily involves removing some choices, and therefore some agency, from consumers. I hope to write more about this, but here is Anne Fleming, (author of City of Debtors which I've been citing frequently) writing aboutthe trade-offs in the caps on interest rates proposed by some prominent Democrats. Making those trade-offs also requires regulators to decide what consumers really want. And that's not always so clear--for instance, here's a look at how "social meaning of money" sociological frameworks do a better job of predicting behavior in retirement accounts than behavioral or rational actor models. And of course the needs and desires of consumers vary so you're not just trading-off between choice and protection but between the needs and desires of different consumers. Yes, this is a bit of a stretch, but here's an article about how women are carving out their own niche in a bit of the household finance world that has been dominated by white men.
Now I recognize that all of this so far is about things going on in the US. But as I frequently argue, the US has a lot more relevance to global conversations than is generally recognized. For instance, here's a story about Facebook turning into a platform for the kind of informal insurance networks we talk about so often in developing countries.
3. Digital Finance: That's a reasonable segue into digital finance, especially since the piece quotes Mark Zuckerberg's ambition to make money as easy to send as a picture (which, y'know, isn't actually very ambitious given that a billion+ people can already do that). But in Hong Kong a lot of them are choosing these days not to do it. Well, at least not to use digital tools to make purchases. Why? Because they are worried that the government will use the data trail to identify who is participating in protests. It's a well-founded worry not just in Hong Kong but around the world, and one that digital finance advocates should be taking much more seriously. And no, cryptocurrency is not in any way a solution for this.
Week of May 24, 2019
1. India: This year I resolved to make sure I was paying more attention to events in countries with large populations that aren't the United States, and not just treating them like an instance of a broader class. Given the elections in India, and the somewhat surprising strength of the BJP's performance, this seems like an opportune moment. Here's a Vox explainer on the elections for those of you who, like me, may have been only vaguely aware of the elections as a referendum on Modi vs. (Rahul) Gandhi. Here's an interesting essay on the most important feature of Indian politics not being the rivalry between parties but the generally uncontested move toward closing off civil liberties and a more authoritarian state. Here's 12 reasons why the BJP won, with perhaps the most interesting point being the BJP's efficiency at actually delivering welfare programs rather than just vague promises about future welfare programs. For those of you following along in the US or Australia, or any other country where right-wing populism has experienced a rebirth, there are clear parallels throughout. Here's Shamika Ravi on policy priorities for the new government (written before the election).
There is more than the election going on. So here's a couple of things that may be more of traditional interest to faiV readers. Demonetization was three years ago. Andeverything is back to where it was--maybe this should make programs with "null effects" feel better. And here's a fascinating study of the social lives of married women in Uttarakhand, with a particular emphasis on how "empowerment shocks" spread through social networks and decay over time.
2. Causality and Publishing Redux: A few things popped up related to last week's focus on causality. One point I touched on was spillovers and general equilibrium effects. Here's a note from Paddy Carter of CDC on the tension for DFIs attempting to invest in ways that are "transformative" (read, lots of spillover effects) and measuring their causal impact. I also noted JDE now accepting papers based on per-analysis plans. Pre-registration isn't going so well in psychology where a new study looked at 27 preregistered plans and the ultimate papers and found all of them deviated from the plan, and only one of those noted the change. Brian Nosek's money quote: "preregistration is a skill and not a bureaucratic process." Which could serve as a theme of Berk Ozler's discussion of using pre-registration to boost the credibility of results, not just for an experiment. Very useful for those interested in developing the pre-registration skill.
This may be stretching it a bit, but Raj Chetty's incipient attempt to replace Ec10 at Harvard got a lot of attention this week. There's a lot to recommend his approach, but there are plenty of people who are concerned about the apparent glossing over of causality. I'm honestly worried that some of these things may cause Angus Deaton and other critics of causal claims from RCTs to go into apoplectic fits. Just when you thought some of the messages might be getting through, along comes a new toy. So I should probably not mention that there's an update to the oldDonohue and Levitt paper on abortion and crime that claims it has better evidencewithout dealing with any of the problems in the underlying model.
3. Micro-Digital Finance: Microfinance can be pretty confusing when you get beyond the simple statements and start to worry about how it actually all works, and how it's changing, and what we do and don't know. Hudon, Labie and Szafarz have a nice little primer on those issues with a microfinance alphabet. I wish I had thought of doing this.
I complained last week about "mobile money" not including payment cards, which dominate the United States. But a telecom-driven mobile money product is now available in the US. Well sort of. Not sure what to make of this yet.
Caribou Digital and Mastercard Foundation have a new study of Kenyan microentrepreneurs "platform practices." I also don't know what to make of this, but that's probably because I haven't read it yet, but I figured many of you would be interested.
Among other things it's hard to know what to make of, there's Earnin, a sort-of payday lender, health care cost negotiator, fintech something. It's confusing. And New York State regulators are confused too, which is probably not a good sign for Earnin. But that's nothing new--I have to point again to City of Debtors, a book that documents New York city and state regulators confusion over how to regulate small dollar lending for more than a century.
Week of May 17, 2019
1. Causality: In this great book I know, Jonathan Morduch describes an obsession over causality as "the marker of the tribe" of economists. Most people outside the field, then, might be surprised to find out how unsettled the science of causality is and how much, after all these years, the practice of academic economics is 80% arguing about causal inference. Well, at least in the circles of applied micro that I run in. Recently Emi Nakamura, an "empirical macroeconomist", won the Clark Medal("American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge") for her work mapping macro theory to macro reality. One of her more well-known papers is a discussion of the gap between theory and evidence in macro; it has a jaw-dropping section on the best existing "evidence" on the effects of monetary policy. So much for an obsession over causal identification.
Now before getting too holier-than-thou over what is considered evidence in macroeconomics, it's worth pointing out that the experimental micro-crowd is just getting around to measuring general equilibrium effects, the defining feature of macro debates. I've linked multiple times to recent work on GE effects of microcredit (and related programs) on labor markets (See here for links and lots of discussion on that). While I was writing about that the other day, it occurred to me to wonder, given what we know about peer effects in education, whether anyone had looked at whether spillovers/GE effects were responsible for the rapid fade-out of early childhood education interventions. Less than 24 hours later, this new paper from List, Momeni and Zenou showed up in my Twitter feed, finding large spillover effects from an early childhood intervention (1.2 SD! on non-cognitive skills, which are increasingly found to be the more important feature of such programs), which lead to substantial underestimation of program impact. On a related note, here's a short video of Paul Niehaus talking about the value of experiments at scale, including better measurement of GE effects.
Still, there are lots of appealing things about using experiments to establish causality, even if it is somewhat akin to looking for the keys under the streetlights. For instance street lights cause a 36% reduction in nighttime outdoor crime in New York City housing developments. Unfortunately, people really don't like the idea of being experimented on, or even the idea of other people being part of an experiment even when the treatment arms are "unobjectionable." (MR summary here). I'm not really sure how to think about that.
If you want to dig deep into causality discussions, Cyrus Samii's syllabus for hisQuant II class this spring is here. Lots (and lots) of interesting and useful links there. If you're more of the video type, Nick Huntington-Klein has a new series of videos on causal inference, including one on causal diagrams and using Daggity to draw them. If you are among the obsessed and want to be even more so, Macartan Humphreys is looking for a post-doc to work with him on causal inference at WZB Berlin.
2. Academic Publishing: To understand the RCT movement you have to know something about one of the world's least efficient markets: economics journals (Yes, I'm sure someone has a paper/post explaining how the market is actually efficient after all). Seema Jayachandran tweeted this week about stats from her first year as co-editor at AEA: Applied: "4% were R&R, 36% were reject w/ reports, 60% were desk rejects." All of her R&Rs were eventually accepted and average and median time to decision was less than 2 months.
Data on the acceptance rates at all the AEA journals shows that Seema is doing an exceptional job. AEJ: Micro received 415 papers over a 12 month period, made decisions on only 55% of them, which were all rejections. Yes, zero of those 415 papers were accepted. The overall data led to this thread from Jake Vigdor with the provocative question: "If a journal...never accepts a manuscript, does it exist?" Or how about this paper from Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett that was finally published in REStat after a decade in R&R? For the record, I have a paper with Michael that we got back for R&R after 4 years that I'm supposed to be revising but I'm writing the faiV instead. While I'm grinding an axe, let me also boost this question from Justin Sandefur on why citations still exist and haven't been replaced by hyperlinks. I wonder if an estimation of the dead weight loss from searching for, formatting and copyediting citation details could get published in an economics journal?
One of the reasons for the dismal acceptance rates in journals is the same as the dismal acceptance rates at top ranked universities. Reputation matters a lot. Tatyana Deryugina has a (revised) proposal on a different way of ranking journals that could lead to a more efficient publishing market. It's a start.
And to close out with some positive news: JDE is now prospectively accepting papers based on pre-analysis plans, without requiring the authors to commit to publishing there. It's almost as if the editors aren't maximizing their oligopolistic power. I hope they don't have their economist credentials revoked.
3. Digital Finance/Bangladesh: When the subject turns to mobile money, the country under discussion is still almost always Kenya even 12 years after the founding of m-Pesa. I have a particular axe to grind about counting use of mobile money without including payment cards, but there is now another reason to look beyond Kenya. There are now more people in Bangladesh with mobile money accounts than in Kenya. Of course, that's a function of population--penetration in Kenya is 73% (axe grinding: 70% of Americans have a credit card; this discussion does not include China), while it's just over 20% in Bangladesh. But we should expect adoption to accelerate in Bangladesh, and Kenya to be left well in the dust in terms of accounts.
Week of May 10, 2019
1. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week: This week, people around the United States give gifts to show appreciation for teachers. One gift that teachers really like is a decent salary. Way back in the late 1970s, U.S. teachers were paid about 5 percent less than other workers with comparable education and skills. But hey, what’s 5 percent? Did you become a teacher to get rich? Hopefully not, since the U.S. teacher penalty is now nearly 20 percent. (Incidentally, evidence from teachers in Rwanda and health workers in Zambia suggests that recruiting career-focused or salary-focused providers delivers at least as good outcomes hiring people with a focus on pro-social motivation. So even if you did go into it to “get rich,” students and patients will be okay.) In Latin America, teachers faced a gap but it was narrowing in the early 2000s. In Africa, primary teachers face a pay gap but not secondary teachers. In the U.S., teachers have been striking at high levels in the last year, in part over salary, and I recently wrote a piece on what the U.S. can learn from international research on raising teacher salaries. In most cases, raising salaries doesn’t increase effort of teachers currently on the job, but it does matter for attracting and retaining good teachers. (Salary increases can also be a good opportunity to introduce other reforms.) De Ree and others make the argument that because the returns to salary increases take place relatively far in the future, it’s unlikely to be a cost effective education investment relative to immediate quality improvements. That said, the high-income countries with the best education results are those that pay their teachers well.
2. First, Do No Harm (in schools): The primary objective of a formal education is arguably to learn things. At least, that’s what the World Bank argues; I realize the statement is not without controversy. But the first priority – if we can separate that from the primary objective – may be to keep children safe. Salisbury has a recent essay on the dual dangers of risky school buildings and violence perpetrated by school workers in low- and middle-income environments. This has been in the news recently with the collapse of a nursery and primary school n Lagos, Nigeria, and the revelation that a staff member at a charity running schools to help vulnerable girls in Liberia was in fact raping girls [Or, you know, the US's refusal to do anything to protect children from being murdered in their schools, so that children have to sacrifice their lives to save their peers--TO]. But it’s not just the news. A recent survey of children in Liberian primary schools shows that one in four children admit to having had sex with a teacher (and more with any member of staff), and in Kerala, India, more than one in five adolescents reported sexual abuse in the last year. Three-quarters reported physical abuse. I’m reminded of this horrifying line inJennifer Makumbi’s masterful novel Kintu, when a primary school girl in Uganda is raped by her math teacher: She “bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care.” It’s hard to imagine children learning and thriving in school under threat of violence.
3. Get the Lights On: By the latest estimates, more than half of people in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to electricity. Last week, Arlet, Ereshchenko, & Rocha highlighted that this is not a village problem: one quarter of the unelectrified are in urban areas. Part of the problem is the irregularity of the available power: regular power outages – common in many countries – deter households from connecting to the power grid. Another factor is how complicated it is to connect to the grid, which is unsurprising: If we want people to do things that they probably want to do anyway (like connecting to the grid), then make it easy for them. Yesterday the World Bank launched a big report on energy in Africa, which showed that in some places, people don’t get electricity even if they live within access to an electrical grid. Connection costs are high and – in addition to the consistency problem above – “electricity connection via conventional AC (alternating current) supply requires minimum building standards that many existing houses do not meet.”
Week of May 2, 2019
1. Microfinance/Household Finance: I mentioned the Hrishipara Financial Diaries last week--it's a project Stuart Rutherford has been running in central Bangladesh for four years now. That's a truly unique data set of high frequency data on the financial lives of households. I also mentioned that Stuart is now funding the continuation of the diaries out of his own pocket. Don't make me beg for someone to step in with more funding so this dataset gets even more valuable. It's incredibly cheap by the way---hmm, maybe the first faiV GoFundMe? See, don't make me resort to such things!
Continuing in the wave of revisiting ideas about microfinance and it's impact, Bruce Wydick has "3 reasons the impact of microcredit might be bigger than we thought." Of course, the "we" in that sentence matters a lot. Mushfiq Mubarak and Vikas Dimble have a short review of microfinance research with handy links to the research we talk about most these days: evidence for ways that microfinance could innovate to increase impact. Of course, I have to return to the binding constraint on microfinance innovation: funding appropriate for investment in innovation.
2. Replication: I know what you're thinking: "Hey, I haven't heard about Worm Wars in a long time. What happened?" And so, let me bring you a new paper from Owen Ozier that reviews the history of the Worm Wars in an effort to understand the state of reproducibility in Economics and related topics. Here is Owen's Twitter thread with some "wild things" he learned working on the paper. And here's Annette Brown's replies (one, two, three) pointing out some longstanding errors in the literature on replication in economics--one lesson is that if you don't read the variable definitions you're likely to draw the wrong conclusions and others won't be able to replicate your work.
Here is an interesting argument that theory constrains degrees of researcher freedom more than experiment--that in fact one of the sources of the replication crisis is a lack of theoretical frameworks around empirical research. Oh, and that empirical work needs more formal mathematical models. In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is coming from the perspective of "behavioral sciences" which apparently does not include economics, where alot of recent argument has been about the need for experiments to constrain degrees of freedom and that "mathiness" is a problem. And here's Dorothy Bishop on "reining in the four horsemen of irreproducibility".
Inherent variability is not one of those four horsemen, but it is a plausible source of irreproducibility that has nothing to do with bad practices or researcher misbehavior. If reactions to stimuli vary a lot based on minor contextual factors (which is in fact one of the findings of behavioral sciences, albeit one that is itself subject to lots of questions about replication), then you should expect that the exact same experiment conducted at a different time and place with different subjects will yield different results. Whether that's the case is the subject of this debate between Simmons/Simonsohn, McShane/Bockenholt/Hansen (not that one), and Judd and Kenney (also not that one), all hosted by Andrew Gelman. It's worth the time to read through.
3. Research and Communications: Taking that conversation as a leaping off point, here's a new paper on demand effects in survey experiments. On the one hand, it may come as a relief to know that the paper doesn't find much evidence of experimenter demand effects. On the other hand, a lot of economics lab experiments are built on the idea that the experimenter can induce people to behave in certain ways with incentives--and when those incentives don't work, it's evidence of some other important factor operating. But, "Even financial incentives to respond in line with researcher expectations fail to consistently induce demand effects." I feel like this paper could not have been published in an economics journal, because the theory constraints (I'm particularly proud of this callback).
Week of April 26, 2019
1. Household Finance: I'm as surprised as anyone that this piece I wrote on the waste of time and money that is mandatory financial literacy classes in the Washington Post seems to be getting as much traction as it is. It's the closest I've ever come to going viral on Twitter (if you want to, here's the tweet just ready and waiting for you to retweet and further drive up those numbers). The comments, by the way, are about what you would expect--and further evidence for Morgan Housel's "you have to live it to believe it" thesis on perspectives of finance. I'm not the only one banging the drum against financial literacy classes: here's Jen Tescher of CFSI imploring banks to stop funding finlit classes and focus on tools that actually help customers.
One of the likely reasons (but certainly not the only one!) that finlit makes such little difference is the mismatch between what is taught and the actual financial lives of most households. Take for instance figuring out income taxes in the new economy. Most people in the US got a tax cut in 2018 but most of those think their taxes actually went up, because the connection between taxes and paychecks is so damned complicated in the US. And trying to figure it out if you're a contractor rather than an employee...
There is something worse than legislators mandating financial literacy. Intuit engaged in shockingly (even for cynical me) deceptive behavior by tricking people into using their paid product rather than the free product that they were eligible for--even going so far as to make sure that search engines didn't index the web page to use their regulatorily mandated free file service so it was for all intents and purposes invisible. No amount of financial literacy is going to fix that. If you were thinking that this sort of behavior was exactly why the CFPB was created you would be right, but since Mick Mulvaney has destroyed the agency, don't expect any meaningful action against Intuit.
This isn't just a US problem. This sort of thing--hiding the information customers need to make good financial decisions--happens everywhere. Think of the changes in transparency of pricing of M-Pesa. Or this audit study by Xavi Gine and Rafe Mazer finding bank personnel in Ghana, Mexico and Peru don't tell customers about the best account for them (the customers that is). This seems like the right time to bang on one of my pet drums: middle-income countries, look to the US to the see the future of your financial system and tremble.
Looking from the other side, the US has a lot to learn from international contexts about how households manage volatile financial lives. Stuart Rutherford has a fantastic write-up of the 3 years of ups-and-downs and coping strategies of a family in the Hrishapara Financial Diaries. Stop what you're doing and read it. But let me also call-out that Stuart is now funding the Hrishipara diaries out of his own pocket. Any funder who is reading this: send Stuart some money to keep up this remarkable work. Please.
My friends at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program have a new report on short-term financial stability and how important it is for any larger goals, based on the work of a number of organizations focused on the issue (NB: I'm a senior fellow of Aspen FSP and was involved in the early discussions that led to this report). Before you international folks keep scrolling...there is a lot of overlap between the insights here and the situation in middle-income and developing countries. And you could easily frame it in the same way that most on the international scene do: the importance of building resilience to shocks.
2. Financial Inclusion: I'm one of the retrogrades who refuses to give up on the term "financial inclusion" (while acknowledging the points made by advocates of "financial security" and "financial health"). Speaking of retrogrades, Matthew Soursourian at CGAP is even more retrograde than I am, making an argument that "access" is important and we shouldn't fetishize "usage." One of the reasons is that usage may be harmful--and Greta Bull argues that we need to talk about that, particularly around credit. Over at Next Billion, Graham Wright of MSC (formerly MicroSave--apparently I'm also retrograde in not changing FAI's name), has some speculation on the next 20 years in financial inclusion (which I take as explicit endorsement for "inclusion" whether Graham meant it or not). One of his key points is on the issue of consumer protection, which in addition to dovetailing with Greta's post, allows me to point out that in every other domain the word "inclusion" means fair and equitable participation and so we should make that part of the defacto definition of financial inclusion. Drawing things fully back to Matthew's post, the one thing I think he misses in the argument for access is network effects. The value of an account has a lot to do with who else has and uses accounts and we should expect usage to trail substantially behind access especially when less than, say, 60% of people have accounts.
Two quick hits on China and financial inclusion: Here's a piece that argues that China's "social credit score" is less coherent and more complex than it is usually portrayed. But then at the Avengers:End Game premiere, one of the trailers was a public shaming of delinquent debtors. I don't know if that's confirmatory or contradictory evidence.
Finally, there is a lot to learn from the history of financial systems and the way they include and exclude. Rebecca Spang reviews a new book (The Promise and Peril of Credit--which would have been a great title for Greta's post--by Francesca Trivellato) about the development of financial instruments in Europe and anti- and philo-semitism and how it shaped economies.
Week of April 12, 2019
1. Arbitrary and Biased: I feel like "arbitrary and biased" should have been the tagline for the faiV but it'll have to do as just the name this week's edition (I won't make the obvious joke). The reference here specifically is an update to my post at CGAP on impact evaluations and systematic reviews of financial inclusion interventions. Duvendack and Mader, authors of a systematic review of reviews that I've mentioned in the faiV and in that post, responded. And then I responded to them. The short version, if you don't want to click on all those links or do a lot of scrolling, is that we disagree substantially (though in good faith!) and particularly on the issues of arbitrariness and bias. My perspective on these issues have been substantially influenced by Deaton's and Pritchett's critiques of RCTs, which feels a bit ironic. Systematic reviews are useful, but they are no less arbitrary nor less biased than other attempts to synthesize the literature--they're just arbitrary and biased in different ways, albeit generally more transparent ways (though what we know about how disclosure affects people's trust leaves a question about the benefits of that disclosure).
Reveling in the arbitrarily biased essential nature of the research enterprise, here are a couple of papers that raise different questions about how the literature on microcredit may be biased. Bedecarrats, Guerin, Morvant-Roux and Roubaudreplicate the Al-Amana microcredit impact study and find errors and issues with the data and code--though exactly how much it matters to the big picture conclusion isn't clear. Meanwhile Dahal and Fiala review the microcredit RCTs focusing on whether they have sufficient power to detect likely magnitude of effects (and find that they aren't) and find significant and meaningful effects on profits when the data is pooled. I need to read both these papers more closely, but they are interesting enough that I didn't want to wait before including them in the faiV.
2. Evidence-Based Policy/Methods: Speaking of arbitrarily biased research, the 5% statistical significance threshold is perhaps the most influential arbitrarily biased feature of modern academic research. Some people are trying to change that--well more than 800 who signed onto a letter in Nature protesting the cutoff. Before you come to a conclusion on whether that letter will make a difference, I must note, as many on Twitter did, that it's not a statistically significant portion of scientists who have signed on.
Another arbitrary bias, according to Nick Lea, deputy chief economist at DfID, is the need to run regressions in economics papers. David Evans, now ensconced at CGD, responds with a defense of regressions and some ideas on how development economics can be better.
Here's a reminder that "purely evidence-based policy doesn't exist" though I'm not sure how many people thought it did. And here's a reminder from Straight Talk on Evidence that short-term impact often fades out, something evidence-based policy really needs to take into account.
And finally, here's an interesting piece from mathemetician Aubrey Clayton adjudicating a long-running dispute between Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb over probabilities, finding that Taleb "overplays his hand."
3. Household Finance: The mythology of Spanish colonialism in the Americas centered heavily on cities of gold (anybody remember this?). Here's a story about the reverse--Dominicans searching Spain (and Switzerland) for lost troves of gold. It's all a scam of course, of the sort immediately recognizable by anyone who has spent time in Latin America. It's a fascinating read because of how the story delves into the psychology that has led so many Dominicans to believe (and continue to believe) an ancestor secreted billions of dollars of gold in Spanish and Swiss banks that they stood to inherit--to the point that they quit jobs and made all sorts of other bad financial decisions. When there is little hope, believing that slow, steady abstemious frugality will matter may seem as much magical thinking as hidden inheritances. Here's a piece from Morgan Housel on how much our (macro)financial experiences affect our later decision making.
Week of April 5, 2019
1. Financial Inclusion: It's an "interesting" time in the world of financial inclusion, in the sense of that (apocryphal?) Chinese curse. There are arguments on whether to change the name of the "sector" accurately reflects the goals, the funding environment is uncertain, digital financial services are shifting business models and regulatory frameworks--all also indications that there is important convergence between "developed" and "developing" countries. But most importantly there are questions about whether the results from the work of the last 40 years (a rough approximation of the modern microfinance movement globally, and the asset-building movement in the US) justify further investment.
You can see the tensions in two recent posts at Next Billion: first, Leora Klapper on the importance of investment in financial inclusion to meet the SDGs; and a fiery response from Phil Mader and Maren Duvendack, authors of the Campbell Collaborative/3ie "systematic review of reviews" that I've likely mentioned a couple of times. But the "interesting" times also explain, at least in part, the raft of other evidence reviews of various sorts that are appearing (IPA, Dvara, UNCDF/BFA,Caribou Digital, CGAP). It's enough to get you to buy into Lant Pritchett's dictum that RCTs are "weapons against the weak."
CGAP asked me to write something about all this--and to do it in under 1000 words. You can guess how well that went, given that the summary for the evidence review I've been working on for CDC is more than 10 pages (you should also read that as an acknowledgement of a specific conflict of interest when it comes to talking about evidence reviews). Anyway, the final result is here. The bottom line is that I'm skeptical of what can be learned from systematic reviews--channeling some other Pritchett-thought on where policy-relevant insights come from.
By the way, if you're skeptical of the point about most interventions struggling to show meaningful impact, here's a new paper making the case that TB public health interventions in the early 20th century had little to do with declining TB-mortality; and here's a paper from the education sector so frustrated that they can't find evidence of impact that they propose doing away with credible large-scale impact evaluations. And here's an open letter to a hypothetical education minister with some useful statistics on how little learning happens in schools in most of the world.
2. Global Productivity: Plenty has been written about stagnant wages, slow growth, and rising inequality in developed countries (if you're based in the US, it might not be apparent that this is a global phenomenon, but it is.) But there's another important phenomenon that hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness nearly as much, probably because the impact isn't as immediately apparent: there's a global productivity slowdown. That's a problem because rising incomes come from growth, and growth comes from productivity gains.
Here's a new paper from Gordon and Sayed documenting the trans-Atlantic trend in slowing productivity, and how closely European productivity growth (or lack thereof) has mirrored that of the US, with a time lag. Their thesis is that the slowdown is related to a "retardation in technical change."
That probably sounds odd given that I know about the paper and you are reading about the paper on using technologies that were essentially unfathomable in 1980. But overall economic dynamism, including technical change has actually slowed dramatically since the post-war years. And there's emerging evidence that there is a single cause for all of these issues: the aging of the population.
It's a fascinating thesis that makes a lot of intuitive sense, and there is growing evidence for it from lots of different directions. I'm sure there will be lots more papers on this in the years ahead, but in the meantime it suggests a few interesting thoughts: a) China has a big problem coming, and b) future productivity growth is going to come from India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and c) we all have legitimate reasons to worry about millennials not having sex.
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.
Week of March 8, 2019
1. The OGs: I can't think about who influences me without beginning with Esther Duflo, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Tavneet Suri (special links to two new papers that would have been in the faiV in a normal week--on the impact of digital credit in Kenya, and UBI in developing countries) and Rachel Glennerster.
2. New Views on Microcredit: Because I'm framing this around research that has influenced me and appeared in the faiV, I've organized these into topical buckets that make sense to me. But keep in mind, that may not be the only thing these economists work on. Cynthia Kinnan and Emily Breza have dug into the Spandana RCT to understand heterogeneity of results, and to used the AP repayment crisis and fallout to understand the general equilibrium effects of microcredit. Natalia Rigol with some of the OGs above followed up on the differential returns to capital between men and women from earlier studies finding the differences are largely due to intrahousehold allocation, not gender; she's also looked into how to better target microcredit to high-ability borrowers. Gisella Kagy and Morgan Hardy uncoverbarriers that women-owned microenterprises face. Rachael Meager creatively usesstatistical techniques to better understand heterogeneity in microcredit impact results. Isabelle Guerin provides insight on why microcredit can go wrong.
3. Savings: I will confess that I have a lot of questions about the savings literature. But that's mainly because of the work of these economists. Pascaline Dupas, of course. Silvia Prina tests encouraging savings in Nepal, while Lore Vandewalle tries to build savings habits in India. Jessica Goldberg runs very creative experiments to understand how savings affects decisions. Simone Schaner studies intrahousehold choices around savings.
Week of March 1, 2019
1. Economics: The dismal science doesn't often generate positive reviews from outside the discipline, so when it does happen it's worth noting. Julia Rohrer, who in addition to having one of the best titled blogs I've ever seen, is a psychology graduate student who procrastinated on her dissertation by attending a summer program in economics. Here is her list of things she appreciated in economics as a positive contrast to her experience in psychology.
On the other hand (hah!), economists typically have a lot to say about what is wrong with economics--certainly I encounter more "friendly-fire" in the econ literature than when I dip my toes in other disciplines (though this is perhaps my favorite example of the intra-disciplinary critique). There's an ongoing discussion about the future of economics going on in the Boston Review--I don't know if that counts as friendly-fire in terms of the outlet, but the participants are economists--starting with an essay by Naidu, Rodrik and Zucman, Economics after Neoliberalism. Then there are responses from Marshall Steinbaum, who notes that "every new generation proclaims itself to have discovered empirical verification for the first time," and from Alice Evans who focuses on the nexus of economics and political power in the form of unions.
But, because it's me writing this, I have to close on a new paper in JDE, that finds that communal land tenure explains half of the cross-country agricultural productivity gap. And here's a piece about how small teams of researchers are more innovative than large teams. generate much more innovation than big teams Neo-liberalism won't go down without a fight!
2. Migration: I haven't touched on migration for a while so it felt serendipitous that Michael Clemens and Satish Chand put out an update to their paper first released in 2008(!) on the effects of migration on human capital development in Fiji. The basic story is that in the late 80's formal discrimination against Indian-Fijians increased sharply, causing the community to both increase emigration and investment in human capital to aid emigration prospects. The net effect, rather than the dreaded "brain drain," was to increase the stock of human capital in Fiji. grapes
Cross-border migration is really the only option in Fiji, but in many countries, like Indonesia, there are lots of internal migration options. Since there is typically a large gap in productivity within countries as well as between countries, internal migrationhas always been a part of the development story. Bryan and Morten have a new article in VoxDev about this process in Indonesia, looking at the productivity gains possible from removing barriers to internal migration.
Since we started off talking about Economics, here's a post from David McKenzie considering the effects of migration on economists--or more specifically, how to think about job market papers about a candidate's country-of-origin. True to his style, David goes deep, including a model, and a survey. The post was inspired by a tweet from Pablo Albarcar who later noted it was mostly a joke about "brain drain" worries.
It is surprising to me how tenacious the brain drain idea is. When I have conversations about it, I try to cite the literature like Clemens and Chand, but I rarely find that makes a dent. People can always find an objection. So I've taken to just asking people how they feel about the "destruction" of Brazilian soccer/football culture and skill due to the mass emigration of the most skilled players. Typically, that leads to several moments of silent blinking. If you're interested here's a paper about "Rodar" the circular human capital investment, migration and development among Brazilian footballers.
3. US Poverty and Inequality: I typically try to avoid the grab-bag approach to items of interest but I'll confess this one is a bit of a grab bag with a variety of connecting threads. We'll start by connecting to a piece I included last week about tax refunds and saving. If you haven't read that, you should. I noted I was grateful for the piece because it meant I could skip the annual ritual of linking to a piece I wrote for SSIR several years ago about rethinking tax refunds. But I should have known that the zombie idea of tax refunds being bad personal finance wouldn't die so easily. Here's Neil Irwin from the NYT on how people being angry about lower refunds shows that "humans are not always rational." I'm struck by the irony that the continuing common use of "rational" in economics requires zero-cost attention, while a foundational truth of the discipline is "nothing is zero-cost." There is nothing irrational about paying a very small fee (in foregone interest) for the valuable service of helping you to save when other services are ineffective. That's especially true if you include, as you should, the cost of the tax advisors and financial advisors required to accurately calculate the proper amount of withholding and to choose the right investment/savings account in which to store those savings. So I guess that connects to the thread about economics maybe not being post-neoliberalism quite yet. And here's a column from the Washington Post's personal finance columnist withpush back on the "refunds are bad" idea from readers who explain their rational choices in their own words.
Week of February 18, 2019
1. MicroDigitalFinance (and women): Questions about gender and financial inclusion have been a part of the modern microfinance movement since the beginning, when Yunus made those initial loans to women. For a long time, the accepted wisdom was that women were more responsible borrowers, repaid at higher rates, and did better things with their earnings than men. Then came several waves of research that called that into question--finding, for instance, that men had much higher returns to capital; that women didn't spend money that differently (outside of the social norms that constrained both their income-earning and -spending choices).
Recently there has been another swing. For me it started with suggestive evidence from Nathan Fiala's grants vs. loans to men and women in Uganda that women's average low returns were driven by the women who had the hardest time protecting money from male relatives--something that didn't make it into the published paper (so factor that into your Bayesian updating). Then Bernhardt, Field, Pande and Rigol re-analysed data from the original returns to capital work and found that women who operated the sole enterprise in their household had returns as high as men. Then Hardy and Kagy dug into why returns to men and women's tailoring businesses were so different in Ghana.
Now Emma Riley has a new paper going to back to Uganda and using mobile money accounts to give a much more definitive answer to the control of funds issue that Fiala's work hinted at. Working with BRAC (it occurred to me yesterday that I think all the subsidy to global microfinance could be reasonably justified just by BRAC), she provided female business owners with a separate mobile money account to receive their loan proceeds--the theory being, of course, that this would allow them to protect the funds much better. She finds that women who received the money in the private mobile accounts had 15% higher profits and 11% higher business capitalthan controls who received the money in cash. There are number of possible mechanisms, but she finds the best explanation is indeed the ability to protect money from the family. This is a big deal.
And last year when I posted a story about Uganda implementing a social media and mobile money tax, I didn't really take it seriously. It turns out I should have. The tax went into effect and Ugandans have behaved like good homo economicuses: mobile money use and social media use is down. Say, that suddenly sounds like a useful policy intervention.
Finally, this rang my confirmation bias bell so hard that there's no way I could leave it out or even wait another moment to put it in the faiV. Maybe I'll include it in every edition from here on out. There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.
2. Youth Unemployment: This wasn't supposed to be "the Uganda edition" but in other women in Uganda research news, here's a paper from a star-studded list of researchers starting with Oriana Bandiera (is it just me or has Selim Gulesci had a remarkably productive last 12 months?) forthcoming in AEJ:Applied on a program to empower adolescent Ugandan women with both vocational and sex/relationship education. They find large effects after 4 yours, boosting the number engaged in income-generating activities (all microenterprise) by 50% (5pp) and cutting teen pregnancy and reported unwanted sex by a third. That's impressive. But your homework assignment is to square these results with the five year follow-up results of Blattman and Fiala's grants to Ugandan teenagers (where all the effects fade out after 9 years) and Brudevold-Newman, Honorati, Jakiela and Ozier vocational training program for young Kenyan women where effects of training and grants dissipate after 2 years. Seriously, this is your homework. Email me with your theories. If you can work in Blattman and Dercon's Ethiopia follow-up (which as disappeared from the web, hopefully temporarily), any of the other papers from this session at ASSA2018, or McKenzie's review of vocational training programs, you get extra credit.
3. Economic History: I've mentioned a couple of times recently that I've been delving into Economic History to learn a bit more about financial system development and the history of banking and consumer financial services. It's been fascinating so I thought I would share a few links in that vein. There are two books that top the list, both of which I think I've mentioned, but since I now consider these as must-reads for anyone interested in financial services along with Portfolios of the Poor, The Poor and Their Money, Due Diligence, and, y'know, cough, cough cough, I'm going to mention them again. City of Debtors covers the tragically unknown history of microcredit in the United States from the 1890s on. Insider Lending is the story of how banking evolved in New England from the 1800s, specifically how economic and political forces turned something entirely self-serving for existing elites into a vital service for the masses.
Week of February 11, 2019
1. Our Algorithmic Overlords: I've long argued that teaching kids to code is as much of a waste of time as financial literacy. The simplified version of the argument is that most people are terrible programmers and computers are already better at coding than the average human. As a consequence I emphasize to my own kids and to others who are blinkered enough to ask my advice, that learning how to communicate/write is a much more important tool for the future (yes, yes, cognitive dissonance).
While I still think I'm right about the first part, it turns out I'm wrong about the second part. Yesterday OpenAI "released" work on an AI system that writes shockingly good text. I use scare quotes because, in another sign of things to come, OpenAI has only published a small subset of their work because they believe that the potential malicious use of the technology is great enough to restrict access. There are a bunch of news stories about this. Here's Wired, for instance. But the most interesting one I've come across is The Guardian because they had the algorithm write an article based on their lede.
Let's stick to the disturbing for a bit, because it's that kind of day. The World Food Program has formed a partnership with Palantir to analyse its data on food distributions, apparently with the main motivation being to look for "anomalies" that indicate that aid is being diverted or wasted. The idea of handing over data about some of the world's most vulnerable people to a private company that specializes in surveillance and tracking of people hasn't gone over well with a wide variety of people. As background, here's an article about what Palantir does for their biggest client, the NSA. Sometimes it seems like some people at the UN look at the one world government kooks and think, "What could we do to make their conspiracy theories more plausible?"
On a more theoretical level, Kleinberg, Ludwig, Mullainathan and Sunstein have a new paper on "Discrimination in the Age of Algorithms," arguing that despite fears of algorithmic discrimination, proving discrimination by algorithms is a lot easier than proving discrimination by humans. Of course, that requires putting regulations in place that allow algorithms to be examined. I'm going to flatter myself by pointing out it's similar to an argument I made in my review of Automating Inequality. So I feel validated.
Speaking of transparency, regulation and of algorithmic surveillance, here's David Siegel and Rob Reich arguing that it's not too late for social media to regulate itself, by setting up something like FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which polices securities firms). It's an argument that I would have given short-shrift to, but the FINRA example is credible.
Finally, I'll be dating myself in the Graphic of the Week below, but here's another way to figure out how old I am: when I was an undergrad, most of the "power imbalance" between developing countries and private firms literature was about GM. Here's a new piece from Michael Pisa at CGD on the new power imbalance and it's implications: the relationship between developing countries and tech giants.
2. Digital Finance: That feels like as reasonable a transition as I'm going to get to new data from Pew on the global spread of smartphones. Given limited consumer protections, regulatory and enforcement capability, and "digital literacy" in many developing countries, I will confess this worries me a lot, cf Chris Blattman's thread on "creating a 20th Century...system in an 18th Century state."
Here's a particular instance of that concern, tieing together the last few items: the rapidly growing use of "alternative credit scores" using things like digital footprints and psychometrics. You can make an argument that such things are huge boon to financial inclusion by tackling the thorny problem of asymmetric information. But there are big questions about what such alternative metrics are actually measuring. For instance, as the article above illustrates, the argument is that in lending, character matters and that psychometrics can effectively evaluate character. But it doesn't ask whether character is in-born or shaped by circumstance? No matter which way you answer that question, you're going to have a tough time arguing that discriminating based on character is fair. And that's all before we get to all the other possible dimensions of opaque discrimination.
The growing use of alternative data is starting to get attention from developed world regulatory agencies, but the first frontier of regulation is likely to be from securities regulators. I don't think they are going to be particularly interested in protecting developing world consumers. I guess that idea about self-regulation is starting to look more appealing, particularly if it's trans-national.
Meanwhile, the frontier of digital finance is advancing rapidly, even without alternative data. Safaricom introduced what is here called a "overdraft facility" in January, but I think of it more as a digital credit card. In the first month it was available, $620 million was borrowed. The pricing seems particularly difficult to parse but that may be just the reporting. One of the very first things I wrote for FAI was arguing for development of a micro-line-of-credit. Now that it's here, I confess it makes me very nervous.
3. Financial Inclusion: That's not to say that digital tools don't hold lots of promise for financial inclusion, just check the Findex. This week CGAP hosted a webinar with MIX on "What Makes a Fintech Inclusive?" There are some sophisticated answers to that question with some good examples, but I often return to the simplest answer: it cares about poor and marginalized people. And so I especially worry when I see answers to that question that lead with tech.
The financial inclusion field as a whole has been in something of a slow-moving existential crisis for the last few years. The best evidence of that is the number of efforts to define or map the impact of financial services and financial inclusion, several of which I'm a part of. Last week I linked to an IPA-led evidence review on financial inclusion and resilience. The week before that to a Cochrane Collaboration review of reviews of evidence on financial inclusion. This week, the UNCDF and BFA published their take on pathways for financial inclusion to impact the SDGs (full report here). I could say I expect there will be more, but I know there will be more in this vein, if I can finish revisions, etc.
Week of February 4, 2019
1. MicroDigitalHouseholdFinance:
I've had to cram what I usually break out into 2 categories into this first item. First, last week I featured a story about Kenyan MFIs being driven "to [an] early grave"and asked if any one had some additional knowledge of that situation. Thanks to David Ferrand (of FSDAfrica) and Alexandra Wall (of CEGA's Digital Credit Observatory), I'm reasonably confident that story is reasonably accurate (I do try to be good Bayesian). Meanwhile, with a broader perspective, Gregor Dorfleitner sent me a link to his recently published research looking at adoption of digital infrastructure by nearly 1000 MFIs globally. It's generally a more hopeful picture of evolution over disintermediation than what is happening in Kenya.
This week, coincidentally I had two conversations about household finances that revolved around individuals' willingness to hide their income from others in the household and that affects outcomes for good or ill. And then, up pops Fred Wherry and colleagues with a new paper on exactly on the mechanics intrahousehold bargaining around borrowing and lending based on research in California. I'm very impressed they avoided "Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." and I do kind of love "Awkwardness, Obfuscation and Negative Reciprocity." And in other new paper news, the titans of financial choice architecture, have a new paper on how use implicit defaults to spur people to make active choices--which seems a better form of nudging than much of what I see.
2. Banking (and Money Transfer Operators): I frequently talk about how financial system regulators in the developing world need to look to the US for a peek into their future. This week I learned that Australia is also a useful cautionary tale. Pretty much the entire banking sector in Australia is facing the prospect of criminal prosecutions after a wide ranging royal commission report that details rampant "fee for no service" practices were widespread.
Meanwhile there are some big changes happening in the global money transfer space, related to Chinese operators attempts to expand globally, and the Trump administrations general antipathy to such moves. Last year, Ant Financial tried to buy MoneyGram before regulators put a stop to the transaction. MoneyGram is now essentially moribund, having lost 83% of it's market value since then, and trying to sell itself to anyone who might have some cash. Ant Financial has moved on to a UK company, WorldFirst, which this week announced it was shutting down it's US operation so that American regulators have no say in the deal. Neither of those stories sound like the prospects for cutting the costs of global remittances are improving.
3. Global Inequality: Last week I purposely skipped over the ridiculous annual OxFam global wealth inequality brouhaha. Perhaps I should stick to my guns, but given the number of people I saw engaging with this Guardian piece from Jason Hickel, that somehow argues that global poverty hasn't been decreasing, and life was great in the 1820s, well...Here's pushback from Martin Ravallion. Here's Max Roser, who was a particular target in the Hickel op-ed.
Turning to doing something about global inequality rather than fantasies about the pastoral idylls of the 1820s, there's been a remarkable flourishing of pieces about tax avoidance by the wealthy. Here's the op-ed from the NYT that inspired the name of this week's edition on the Trump tax cuts enabling corporate tax dodging. Here's a new paper in the AER finding that globalization since 1994 has led to the labor income tax burden of the middle class rising, while that on the top 1 percent fell. Here's a new brief from Danny Yagan at SIEPR on how high earning wealthy entrepreneurs dodge taxes on labor income of about $1 trillion per year. And using data from Gabriel Zucman, here's a piece from the Washington Post on the new club of wealth inequality, with charter members China, Russia and the US.
Week of January 28, 2019
1. MicroDigitalFinance: Back before the holidays, I hosted the first faiVLive on how to think about microcredit impact based on recent evidence. If you missed it, you can watch it here (and people are still watching it, I'm happy to say). Here's Bruce Wydick's take on the proceedings if you prefer text to video.
Last week, there was some discussion of evidence gaps, and it's clear that I'm not the only one thinking in this direction. On the heels of that Campbell Collaborative review-of-reviews, IPA has a review of evidence (and gaps) on "Building Resilience through Financial Inclusion" that makes a lot more sense to me.
Okay, now to some less-meta items. Well only a little bit I guess. Remember that Karlan and Zinman paper about high-cost loans in South Africa that found positive effects? It was a lending for resilience story. Now there's a company in California offering high-cost loans to people via their landlords, specifically marketed to help them not miss a rent payment or to pay a security deposit. The article mostly ignores fungibility, presuming that the actual use of the loan proceeds are paying rent rather than covering some other emergency, but that seems unlikely to me. In the US Financial Diaries we saw that housing payments were much more erratic than other types of payments, though the data wasn't clean enough to really draw any firm conclusions. So is this a lending-for-resilience story or a new version of payday lending debt traps?
Speaking of payday lending debt traps, we usually use that phrase metaphorically. But there's a UK payday lender who is apparently eager to make it more literal. Yes, they are advocating for a return to debtors' prisons (darn that asymmetric information and moral hazard!). And even doubling down on the idea.
Finally, here's a story (HT Matthew Soursourian) about Kenyan MFIs being driven "to [an] early grave" as digital financial services allow commercial banks and non-banks to siphon off the customer base. Disintermediation was not exactly the story that early proponents of mobile money were hoping for, but it does fit with the historical record of financial systems development. If you know anything about this, or can vouch for the accuracy of the information in the article, I'd love to hear from you.
2. Global Development: I'm going to skip the on-going "shooting fish in a barrel" about OxFam's annual global wealth publicity/outrage stunt since there's nothing at all new there. Better to spend your limited attention on this NYTimes op-ed from Rohini Pande and colleagues on the "new home for extreme poverty."
If you follow these topics at all, you know that new home is middle-income countries like India. The Congress Party's proposal of a not-universal basic income to address the persistence of extreme poverty in the country has been getting a fair amount of attention. Apparently Angus Deaton and Thomas Piketty are advising Congress, though from my experience with politicians "advising" could mean "we read their books." Here's Maitreesh Ghatak's take on what it would take for the policy to work.
On the other side of the world, I've watched the evolving situation in Venezuela with a great deal of personal interest. I grew up in Colombia, a few hours from the Venezuelan border, and learned relatively recently that an ancestor of mine funded an invasion of Venezuela in the early 1800s. Particularly my interest has been caught by some economists volunteering to educate politicians and pop culture figures on what is going on, in the hopes of stopping bad takes. Here, by the way, courtesy of Chris Blattman, is a deeper background piece on the Maduro regime than you may find elsewhere. The macroeconomic quirks of access to gold reserves and of sovereign and not-so-sovereign bonds under sanctions have been pretty interesting too. And here's Cindy Huang of CGD on the potential for Colombia accessing concessional funding to help finance programs for Venezuelan refugees.
Finally, I'm happy to claim, without evidence, that my request for Rachel Glennerster to post her Twitter thread on what she's learned in her first year as DfID's chief economist as a blog post so that was easier to share, cite and archive caused this blog post compiling her Twitter thread.
3. Small Business: My fixation with breaking down the silo between financial inclusion in the US and internationally extends beyond household finance. The story of most small business in the US is the same as it is in developing countries--they are not high-growth "gung-ho" entrepreneurs but frustrated employees trying to generate an income in the face of labor market failures of various sorts. So the perennial development topic of how to increase lending to SMEs should be looking to the US, and those in the US should be looking internationally.
For most small and micro-businesses the biggest financial challenge isn't getting credit to invest, but managing cash flow and liquidity. Square, which has historically been focused on enabling retail consumer-to-business payments, recently announced a new product specifically to tackle this problem: a debit card that allows real-time access to balances. To put it in development-speak, Square is offering trade credit to small merchants to cover the trade credit they provide to customers. I'm super-interested in seeing how well it works.
Week of January 21, 2019
1. MicroDigitalFinance: Many of you will be familiar with the story of microcredit's rise and sort-of fall, and it's current state of--I don't know, existential angst? But if not, the story is ably told in a new Vox piece by Stephanie Wykstra, with some comments from Jonathan and I included. Not too long after that, the Campbell Collaborative and 3ie issued a "systematic review of reviews" of the impact of financial inclusion, led by Maren Duvendack. I have to say it's kind of weird. The one sentence conclusion is "Financial inclusion interventions have very small and inconsistent impacts." Which apart from appending an "s" to the perfectly plural "impact", I don't disagree with. But this format is a review of reviews which imposes some weird constraints. Ultimately only 11 of 32 identified studies were included, and only one of those was from an economics journal, two are earlier Campbell or 3ie publications, two are specifically only about women's empowerment, and three are about strangely specific topics like HIV prevention. So I'm left really uncertain what to think of it.
Of course, the hot topic isn't generic microfinance but digital finance. The Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa has an updated "evidence gap map" of research on the impact of digital finance featuring 55 studies (which is more than I have had the time to delve into so I can't compare it to the Campbell/3ie inclusion set). There's a summary of the findings at Next Billion.
Finally, here's an interesting story about Econet, the Zimbabwean mobile money provider--interesting in that it is really about the evolution of mobile money providers from following M-Pesa to following Tencent.
2. US Inequality: A big part of the story of understanding US inequality specifically, and inequality in developed countries in general, is understanding what has happened to wages of low-skill workers. The NYTimes has a piece on how cities have shifted from being the "land of opportunity" for such workers to a trap, based on work that David Autor presented in his Ely Lecture at the AEAs (by the way, AEA, it's still a good time to rename the Ely Lecture!).
One policy option for addressing stagnant wages for low-skill workers is to raise the minimum wage. Cengiz, Dube, Lindner and Zipperer continue their long-running work on the effects of 138 minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016. They find increased earnings and essentially no effect on number of low-wage jobs.
That's encouraging. Less encouraging is a new paper from Rodrik and di Tella finding that people are really, really happy to support protectionist policies, regardless of their politics, as a policy response to trade shocks.
3. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Speaking of people's attitudes, there's a big new report on Americans' attitudes on artificial intelligence from something called the Future of Humanity Institute, which as a name is somewhat creepy in my opinion. Maybe I've seen/read too much dystopian fiction. Anyway, they find that Facebook is the least trusted institution when it comes to AI development (no surprise) and the US military is tied for most trusted (big surprise, apparently these people haven't seen/read the same dystopian fiction I have). Also of interest, the median respondent thinks there's a 50% chance that robots will be able to fully replace human beings in less than 10 years. And just because, here's a Night Before Christmas style poem about the future of AI.
Week of January 7, 2019
1. The History of Banking: For a project I'm working on I've been thinking a lot about financial system development and have gotten a bit obsessed with the history of banking. You might think that with a topic so core to economic thinking there would be some consensus on things like what banks do and how they came to do them. But you would be wrong. I've had great fun reading conflicting accounts of the history of banking in the US and Germany over the last few weeks. At the AEA exhibit floor I stumbled on a new book about the history of banking in France, Dark Matter Credit. The short version is that informal banking was a massive part of the French economy, and worked better in many ways than French banks until World War I, and it took regulation to finally allow formal banks to displace the informal system. I also picked up Lending to the Borrower from Hell and just in the first few pages discovered that Italian "friars, widows and orphans" were buying syndicated loans to Charles the II of Spain in 1595. The bottom line is that informal finance was much more efficient and "thick" than I believed, and formal banking extended much further much earlier than I had known. There's also a new book on banking crises in the US before the Federal Reserve, Fighting Financial Crises, which is equally relevant to thinking about the much-more-grey-than-you-would-think borderland between formal and informal banking.
To tie this all more specifically to the AEA meetings than just what was on display at the book vendors' booths, one of my favorite sessions was Economics with Ancient Data. Though I'll confess I'm not sure whether to be heartened that things we are doing now can have persistent effects for thousands of years, or depressed that our present was determined by choices thousands of years ago.
2. MicroDigitalHouseholdFinance: There was of course a number of new(ish) papers on our favorite topics, further condensed here. Here's the session on financial innovation in developing countries and one specifically focused on South Asia. Some of these papers have appeared in recent editions of the faiV already, but I want to call out a couple specifically. Microcredit, I've argued, is in dire need of innovation. So I'm always pleased when I see papers on innovation in the core product terms, like this paper from India on allowing flexible repayment, and while it wasn't at AEA,this one in Bangladesh. In both cases, allowing borrowers to skip payments results in higher repayment rates and better business outcomes. I see these as part of an evolving understanding that microcredit is a liquidity-management product, not an investment product. Credit can also be a risk-management product, as long as you know it's going to be there when you need it. That's the story of this paper on guaranteed loans for borrowers in the event of a flood (in Bangladesh). Another cool innovation in microcredit. Of course, the next question is who is going to insure the MFI so that it has the liquidity to make good on emergency loan promises?
There was a session titled "Shaping Norms" that I almost missed out on because of the somewhat oblique title. There were some very interesting papers here on how household preferences get formed, and how they can be changed, including longer-term data on the experiment in Ethiopia that I think of as launching the "changing aspirations" theme that we see more and more of.
I was amused that there were simultaneous sessions on "Finance and Development" and "Financial Development" but the poor Chinese student beside me was very confused as apparently the translations in the official app did a poor job of differentiating between the two. Both had interesting papers, but I found this on the sale of a credit card portfolio from a department store to a bank (which has access to more credit bureau data) in Chile, and this on bank specialization in export markets particularly interesting.
But moving outside of the AEA realm, my confirmation bias prevents me from not including two other related items on Household Finance. First, Matthew Soursourian of CGAP has some pointed questions about the usefulness of "financial health" as a concept, questions I thoroughly endorse. Second, there is documentary evidence (for instance, here) that I've long been skeptical of the story about mothers in developing countries caring about their children while fathers don't. I find it more than vaguely racist as these stories typically only involve countries where the majority of fathers are black or brown. Anyway, at long last someone, specifically Kathryn Moeller, tried to track down one of the more common statistics on women spending more money on children and found that there is no source, and it was apparently made up as part of a marketing campaign. But that's just the start. Seth Gitter links to three studies that find no difference in investment in children (and I'll add the Spandana impact evaluation to his list) and Martin Ravallion points out that the "70% of world's poor are women" stat seems equally unsourced.
3. Entrepreneurship, Reluctant and Otherwise: Overall, the paper that left me thinking the most is a long-term update to the Blattman and Dercon experiment randomizing employment at factories in Ethiopia. If you need a catch-up, the original experiment had three arms: control, a $300 cash grant plus business training and a job in a "sweatshop"-type factory. While there were positive effects for the entrepreneurship group, the jobs didn't improve income and had negative effects on physical health. After five years, all the differences dissipate (hours worked, income, health, occupational choice). Pause to think about that for a moment--after several years of higher incomes from entrepreneurship, the average person in that arm shut down their business. And the control group started microenterprises and got factory jobs (filling the gaps left by the treatment arm participants who dropped out?). It's another piece of a growing puzzle about why microenterprises don't grow, or more specifically why people don't seem to invest in their microenterprises, even when the income is higher than the alternatives. Stuart Rutherford has been thinking about that too, and because it's Stuart, he went out and interviewed participants in the Hrishipara Diaries to try to get some answers.
Week of December 17, 2018
1. Economics? What Is It Good For?: It's hard to spend any time paying attention to methodological and disciplinary debates without thinking of the Planck/Samuelson dictum about science advancing via funerals. Here, I'm thinking of attitudes toward the value of field experiments specifically and the "credibility revolution" generally. Christopher Ruhm recently gave a speech, in paper form here, about the "credibly-answered unimportant questions" vs "plausibly-but-uncertainly-answered important questions" debate. I found it helpful because it makes the hollowness of this concern more evident than usual, but you'll have to wait on the book chapter I'm procrastinating on to read why. Noah Smith has a more charitable take on Ruhm's speech, with the added important note that one of the big problems of the field is that outsiders don't understand the difference at all.
On the credibility side of things, there are issues beyond just the identification strategy. Here's an interview with Ted Miguel on transparency and reproducibility, a neglected part of the credibility revolution as far as I'm concerned. David Roodman has resurfaced with two new papers doing the hard work of reproducing results. He looks at Bleakley's study of the effects of hookworm elimination in the US and of malaria control in the Americas, questioning the result of the first, but largely upholding the result of the second.
But there's yet another dimension of credibility that I feel like is even more neglected, hearkening back to Paul Romer's mathiness paper: the comprehensibility of methods and tools. Here's a recent example: Declare Design has a lengthy discussion of whether and when to cluster standard errors, inspired by questions posed by David McKenzie and Chris Blattman. It's great. But is anyone else concerned about how few people actually understand the statistical methods we rely on? And that problem is going to get worse, as more and more machine learning and AI techniques come to the fore, techniques that perhaps even fewer understand. And the people that do understand them often don't understand causal inference or the philosophical issues around such basic concepts as fairness.
I guess, therefore, in fairness I should point out that apparently economics is good for sports, specifically the NFL (at last), and it is good for showing that the Planck/Samuelson dictum is true.
2. A Clash of Civilizations: Part of the curious thing about the way the RCT debates in economics evolved is the frequent citing of the use of RCTs in medicine as justification for their use in economics. It's curious because seemingly the understanding of causal inference methods in medicine isn't great. Here's a piece from JAMA (trigger warning: it calls RCTs the gold standard) on why you shouldn't take people out of your treatment group and put them into your control group because the treatment didn't work for them. It's not quite that bad, but still. Here's a thread from Amitabh Chandra on that paper and the general lack of causal inference understanding in medicine.
And here is a fascinating piece of work about how causal claims in health research get steadily ratcheted up. The authors looked at the 50 most shared journal articles about the health effects of exposure to something, finding "that only 6% of studies exhibited strong causal inference, but that 20% of academic authors in this sample used language strongly implying causality." And then the general news media further ratcheted up the causal claims.
I include that as important background to the clash of civilizations that happened recently when Jennifer Doleac, Anita Mukherjee and Molly Schnell wrote about the causal effects of harm reduction strategies related to opioid addiction, reviewing the literature and especially their paper on the impact of naloxone distribution. They find that naloxone access reduces short-term mortality but increases long-term mortality. That doesn't sit well with a wide variety of people outside economics. This is one of the tamer reactions from outside economics (trigger warning: it also refers to RCTs as the gold standard), tamer in the sense that it actually attempts to grapple a bit with the issues. But it ultimately settles on a version of the trope that "we already know the answer, so your causal inference sucks" and "Here's a study of a different intervention that works, so your causal inference sucks." You have to admire (well, you don't, but I do) Doleac for continuing to wade into controversial topics where there are people with very strong priors such as whether bail-setting algorithms might in fact be fairer than judges.
Public Health and Medicine aren't the only areas where economics clashes with other disciplines. Perhaps that has something to do with how insular economics publishing is. Tying all this together, here's a thread from Jake Vigdor about economic publishing insularity (See Graphic of the Week below) linking to this very cool set of visualizations about cross-disciplinary references in academic journals. Suffice it to say Econ is not doing well at being noticed outside of Econ journals. Perhaps the Doleac et al paper may make a dent in the public health journals.
Week of December 10, 2018
1. Targeting: I intended for the faiVLive conversation to spend more time on targeting than we did--it's a sort of rushed conversation at the end. Targeting is something that I've been thinking about a lot, but I'm not sure what I think yet. So forgive me for just ruminating on a few things here.
The whole concept of microcredit is based on targeting--every lender has to target not only those interested in taking a loan but those interested in repaying a loan. Hand-in-hand with targeting repayers was targeting borrowers who were "entrepreneurs," people who would start a business, since the belief was a new microenterprise was the only plausible way for these very poor households to repay. But since the rhetoric emphasized that the poor were natural entrepreneurs, targeting repayers substituted 1:1 for targeting entrepreneurs. Given the findings of microcredit impact studies--namely that while average impact is minimal, there are people who see large gains--the focus on targeting has returned. See for instance, asking middle men who the best farmers are, or surveying other microenterprises.
But if your aim is reducing poverty, then you have to care about more than just finding the borrowers who will repay and have the highest returns on capital--you have to care about equity as well and the effect on, or exclusion of, the poorest or least able to generate high returns. Earlier this year I linked to a paper by Hanna and Olken on the equity effects of targeted transfers vs. UBI. Here's an interview with the two that summarizes their findings: for most poor countries, targeted transfers far outperform a UBI in terms of total welfare. And by the way, here's new Banerjee et al paper from Indonesia showing limited distortions from proxy-means tests.
Of course, in targeting microcredit we are doing the opposite essentially: looking for a proxy-means test to exclude the least-able to generate high returns. What effects might that have? If we boost market efficiency, it could be good for most everyone. That's not just theoretical--here's an empirical finding from Jensen and Miller on improving market efficiency in Kerala boat-building finding higher aggregate quality, lower production costs and lower quality-adjusted prices. But maybe not. That paper above on using middle-men to target finds that traditional allocation of loans does better for the poorest. And as we discussed on the faiVLive conversation, there can be systematic differences in market structure that limits who can generate high returns (in this case, among women seamstresses in Ghana). It's why I worry about what exactly is being measured in targeting algorithms like EFL/Lenddo.
The possible gains and losses have to be measured against the cost of targeting. The cost of microcredit as it exists, without targeting, is pretty low. The median subsidy per loan is about $25, not much for spreading access to the liquidity management features of microcredit well beyond those with high returns to capital. And then there is reason to think about the effect of greater targeting on the microfinance business model. Here is one of the few economics papers to make me actually angry, suggesting that microcredit contracts were purposefully designed to limit the growth of borrower's businesses. While I wholly reject that claim, the underlying idea is worth considering: microcredit's low relative costs are based on a mass-lending business model and MFIs have largely failed to find a way to compete higher up the banking value chain. Altering that business model could have unintended consequences. That's not just based on that paper. As I mentioned last week, City of Debtors, a book about small sum lending in New York City during the 20th century confirms the business model problem is real and pervasive.
So I don't really know what I think. I'll keep thinking about it, but as always I appreciate your thoughts if you're willing to share them.
2. US Inequality: I haven't covered US Inequality for several weeks, and so things have been building up. And there's been a whole lot of new stuff in the last few weeks. Let's start with the state of median US income over the last 30 years. The widely held current view is that incomes for all but the top quintile or decile have been stagnant. But that's heavily dependent on all the adjustments that need to be made for taxes, transfers, inflation and innovation. Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute summarizes the past and new work trying to measure changes in median income, and then writes in more detail about the methodological issues. One thing that had particularly slipped by me: Picketty, Saez and Zucman have a newish paper updating the famous results that showed stagnation and find median incomes have increased about 30% over the last 30 years. That shifts the proportion of gains by the top decile from around 90% to around 50% (I'm intentionally rounding these numbers because they are so sensitive to methodological choices, that I think we're all better off not reporting precise numbers because of the illusion of certainty that goes along with them). Perhaps one of the reasons that these new findings didn't seem to get as much attention as the idea of stagnation for the middle class, is that the new paper also finds that stagnation is true for the bottom 50% of the income distribution.
This week the US Census also released it's "Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates" for 2017, with county-level data on incomes and poverty rates. They find that over the last 10 years, median incomes in 80% of US counties were unchanged, with 11% of counties seeing an increase and 8% seeing a decrease. When you look at the maps, it's apparent that a majority of the counties seeing an increase are related to the fracking boom (and thus mostly in places with very few people). On the poverty front, there's a whole lot of stagnation too, with almost 90% of counties seeing no change, but 8% seeing an increase and only 3% seeing a decrease. Not an encouraging picture.
Whenever you talk about incomes and poverty, it's worthwhile to think about the definition of poverty. Here's Noah Smith on updating the definition of poverty to include volatility (though he shockingly fails to mention the US Financial Diaries). And here's Angus Deaton on "How America poverty became fake news"--with some more methodological detail and the horrid engagement of the present administration with international attempts to measure poverty.
There's plenty new on the policy front as well. Here's a new paper estimating the total budget effect of the EITC--finding that the program self-finances 87% of its cost by reducing use of other transfer programs and increasing taxes collected. And here's The Hamilton Project on the work histories of people receiving SNAP and Medicaid benefits, finding that the majority are working, but irregularly and a substantial portion would "fail to consistently meet a 20 hour per week-threshold" because their hours worked vary so much from week-to-week.
Week of December 3, 2018
1. faiVLive Background: The motivation for the faiVLive experiment is discussing what to think about microcredit impact given all the research in recent years. If you can't make it, or if you can, here's your quick cheat sheet to the recent research.
Of course it's starts with the average impact of microcredit being very modest. A Bayesian Hierarchical model look at the data confirms those findings. But there is important heterogeneity hidden within those average effects--"gung-ho" microborrowers do see substantial gains from increased access to credit. It's also true that these are mostly studies of expanding access to formal credit, not introducing it. That's hard to measure, but we can get a cleaner view of the value of credit when it gets taken away from most everyone--and that shows significant benefits, though through a somewhat unexpected channel: casual labor wages. Changes in labor wages can matter a lot for understanding the impact of a program, even entirely masking any benefits of an intervention with evidence that it makes a substantial difference in many contexts. And it's clear that changes in labor supply are quickly passed through into labor rates--in this case, the markets seem to be working fairly well. But it's not just labor markets. When microcredit affects local markets--by increasing or decreasing the supply of tradeable goods--the benefits may be substantial but mostly captured by the people who aren't using microcredit (what economists call general equilibrium effects). Which makes it all the more important to understand local market dynamics, especially when in many cases microenterprises are operating in sectors where supply exceeds demand. That being said, microcredit is a cheap intervention relative to other options. And it's possible we could increase the returns to microcredit for more reluctant microenterprise operators by boosting their aspirations. Or perhaps by doing better targeting of lending. But is it worth targeting? Households do seem to do a pretty good job of allocating access to capital to its most productive use within the household, and the gung-ho entrepreneurs are benefiting even without the expense of targeting.
2. MicroDigitalFinance and Household Finance: I suppose all of the above would qualify here as well, but here's a bunch of different new stuff, starting with the digital side of things. There are two new papers about the effects of SMEs adopting digital payments. In Kenya, an encouragement intervention led to 78% of treated restaurants and 28% of pharmacies adopting Lipa Na m-Pesa, and consequent increases in access to credit. In Mexico, a different kind of encouragement--the government distributed massive numbers of debit cards as part of the Progresa program--led small retailers to adopt POS terminals. That led to wealthier customers shifting some of their purchasing to these smaller retailers, and increased sales and profits for the retailers, but not an increase in employees or wages paid. On a side note, it's curious that the smaller shock of debit card distribution (pushing debit card ownership to 54% of households) had a large effect on retailers but the larger shock of m-Pesa being adopted by practically everyone has not led to more Lipa Na m-Pesa adoption.
A few weeks ago I featured a puzzle in savings from two savings encouragement experiments--the encouragement worked but savings plateau at a level well below what would seem optimal. Isabelle Guerin sent me a couple of papers that I'm still reviewing that might help explain why, but this week I stumbled across another example. The US CFPB, back in the days when it was allowed to do stuff and wasn't a hollow shell of existential dread, ran an experiment using American Express Serve cards and the "Reserve" functionality. They find that encouraging savings works--people boost their savings--but that the savings plateau after the 12 week encouragement and stay at roughly the same level for 16 months. That's consistent with the results from India and Chile but not with a model of accumulating lump sums or precautionary savings. You would expect among this population that they would experience a shock in that 16 month period and draw down the savings. Participants say they reduce payday loan use, but frankly I don't believe any claims about payday behavior that isn't based on administrative data (and it doesn't make sense if balances were stable).
And finally because I want to encourage this behavior, Maria May sent me an interesting new paper on offering microcredit borrowers flexibility in repayment--customers get two "skip payment" coupons to use during the term of their 12 month loan cycle. Consistent with the much earlier work from Field et al, it yields more investment from borrowers, better outcomes and lower defaults.
3. Evidence-Based Policy: I noted last week that GiveWell, where I have served on the board since it's founding, released it's Top Charity recommendations. One of those is GiveDirectly. GiveWell, as is it's wont, wrote up some details of it's analysis of GiveDirectly, particularly about spillovers from cash transfers. That analysis was significantly informed by a forthcoming paper on general equilibrium effects and spillovers from one of GiveDirectly's programs that GiveWell was given access to even though it is not yet public. Berk Ozler took issue with that. And GiveWell responded. I have nothing whatsoever to do with GiveWell's research process or conclusions, but I was heavily involved advising GiveWell on its response to Berk's questions.