1. Financial Inclusion: I have no idea what your priors are about financial inclusion, but I think it still matters a lot and you'll be seeing more about that from me in the faiV and elsewhere in coming months. The best way to update your priors on the state of financial inclusion is the Global Findex of course. I've been including things in drips and drabs, but Sonja Kelly and Beth Rhyne of CFI have now published their reasonably comprehensive look at the data, complete with lots of charts, available for everyone (and Sonja definitely deserves a vacation after all her work on this and the Gallup data).
CFI is certainly onboard with the theme of updating priors. The title of the report is "Financial Inclusion Hype vs. Reality" and the Introduction invites you to "Recalibrate." The big message is that despite growth in account ownership, there's no growth in usage and lots of troubling signs, like falling savings rates. You can feel the exasperation in the report, an exasperation that I generally share, given what seems to be a general fatigue around financial inclusion. These data don't in any way support the idea that it's time to move on from financial inclusion. But I'm less concerned than Sonja and Beth about the growing gap between access and usage. Consumer banking does have network effects--value of usage increases rapidly with the number of other users--but those effects take time. The population being served was never likely to be heavy users, which increases the time before network effects surface and become self-reinforcing. So it makes sense to me that as we get better at access, the gap between access and usage should grow for a while.
One place I'm not updating my priors based on this data is showcased in their Figure 6, illustrating that rapid growth in digital payments is not showing up in borrowing or savings. I've always been puzzled by the idea that making it easier for people to spend was going to boost savings.
Given that the empirics in Findex aren't very encouraging on progress in financial inclusion, here's a new paper from Besley, Burchardi and Ghatak laying out the benefits of inclusion. The most interesting thing about it is how well it aligns with what we've been seeing on general equilibrium effects of microcredit--it raises wages for the average worker. That's bad for impact evaluations, but good for more people and a powerful reason to continue investing in inclusion.
2. US Inequality: Speaking of average workers, a big reason for this week's theme is the new BLS numbers on contingent work that set the US Economy commentariat aflame yesterday. The big story is that contingent work--which includes freelancers, gig workers, temps, etc.--has not increased since 2005, the last time it was measured (here's a 2 minute overview). That's pretty remarkable since none of the gig platforms we hear so much about today existed back then. But the numbers are hard to interpret. Ben Casselman has a good overview of the issues here, chief among them being that the BLS asks about "primary" job and counts as non-contingent any regular job regardless of how steady the hours are. So the "no growth" data is consistent with findings from the SHED that 30 percent of Americans now rely on contingent work to make ends meet and from JP Morgan Chase Institute that gig work accounts for about 30% of income for those that do participate.
The bottom line: whatever your priors were, you should probably hold them more weakly than before.
But if you were looking forward to actually updating your priors, here's something I found surprising: income inequality in the US stopped growing some time ago (though the conclusions in that piece beg the question, in the logic sense of that term). And here's a paper from late last year that finds that what can be reasonably thought of as "freelance" professionals--doctors, accountants, lawyers--are responsible for most of the growth in income inequality since 2000.
3. Our Digital Overlords: Another inspiration for this week's theme was this piece by David Leonhardt, reviewing Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, a new book that considers the benefits of a data-rich markets for consumers, and the danger that data-rich markets lead to monopolies and less employment. But the thing that most caught my eye, in terms of updating priors, is a casual reference to the story of the Kerala fishermen benefiting from cell phones. That's a story that is very much in doubt, but seemingly few people have updated their priors (see also this). As a side note, if anyone knows of more current research on the story or an effort to sort through the claims (beyond what is in the comments on that piece), please let me know. But searching for that link on the Kerala story, I noticed several other stories on the ICTworks site about surprising failures of digital tools to improve market functioning. My eye was specifically drawn to a story I remember blogging about at least a decade ago: sharing market prices with African farmers via text messaging didn't work out nearly as well as it seemed it would.
My bottom line here is influenced by two studies about police bodycams that were released this week, one in Milwaukee and one in Spokane, which seem to have found opposite effects on a major outcome measure (the number of self-initiated stops police make) without having much other effects. That bottom line is I shouldn't make predictions about how technology will change behavior, or even have strong beliefs after reading a paper about such things.
First Week of June 2018
1. Microfinance: There are things that make you feel old. Like discovering that KGFS, the Indian "wealth management for the poor" not-a-start-up-anymore is 10 years old. Here's Bindu Ananth's, one of the co-founders, reflections on what they've learned over those 10 years. There's apparently a Field and Pande impact evaluation on its way shortly, which will be must reading. I'm struck by a couple of points in Bindu's post: a) that their take-up rates are so high that they are seeing general equilibrium effects (further cementing for me that GE effects and household risk are the two most important things to be thinking about in microfinance, and financial inclusion more broadly, right now), and b) the attention paid to the behavior and bandwidth of front-line staff (OK, three most important things).
But there are other things to think about too--here's MicroSave's latest Low Income Living newsletter focused on microfinance and WASH.
2. Global Development: For as long as I've been paying attention to Global Development there have been big think pieces and agendas for transforming aid. Right behind me are some of the first books I was handed way back then: Inside Foreign Aid, A Bed for the Night, Lords of Poverty. Here's Jeremy Konyndyk of CGD's review of the reform agenda of the past decades, why they haven't worked, and the pros and cons of what's happening now. Since he's focused on incentives, of course I liked it. Here's Paul Currion's paper on Network Humanitarianism for ODI, which he calls the "other half" of Jeremy's paper.
But that's macro stuff. Micro matters too and any discussion of the macro has to make sense in light of micro-realities. Here's Helen Epstein's review of a new book about Rwanda, titled In Praise of Blood. Marc Gunther recently paid a visit to Rwanda--here's his initial reflections including a discussion with Josh Ruxin, the founder of the Kigali restaurant/hotel Heaven and author of a very different book about Rwanda, from 2013. Realizing that was only 5 years ago makes me feel almost as old as learning KGFS is 10. Marc promises a good bit of reporting on his visit in the weeks to come.
And here's a Nature story on the many trials of unconditional cash transfers that are one of the macro-trends that Konyndyk writes about.
3. Household Finance (and Data Redux): Or perhaps I should have called this item financial inclusion or even financial health. Hot on the heels of Findex, Gallup has a 10 country survey of households, sponsored by MetLife Foundation, called the Global Financial Health Study. It's a really interesting set of data on how households feel about their finances. You can get to the reports and the data via this page in a multi-step process which I'm sure Ideas42 had nothing to do with designing.
Here are Sonja Kelly of CFI and Evelyn Stark of MetLife's take on the results. I'm not a huge fan of the "financial health" terminology--though that's a story for another time--but I am a huge fan of the way Sonja and Evelyn take on the difficulties of all the different phrases we use--financial health, financial inclusion, financial access, etc. All of our terminology fails at some level to capture what we are really after, and so we need a combination of metrics and methodologies to make sure we don't lose our way (such as how the focus on measuring financial inclusion led to paying too much attention to account openings).
I also promised to pass along things that I found around Findex, and here are two that both focus on the problem that Sonja and Evelyn write about: access does not necessarily lead to usage which does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes.
Week of May 21, 2018
1. Banking: Coinbase, a cryptocurrency trading platform, is doing something strange: acting a lot like a traditional bank by emphasizing its stability and trustworthiness. As Matt Levine points out (save that link, it's going to come up again later), this is the central paradox of cryptocurrencies--they supposedly do away with the need for trust, but most everyone needs a trusted intermediary to keep hold of their cryptocurrency and protect them against fraud. Y'know the sort of things that banks or governments do (or enable and enforce with regulation). You've probably heard the mantra that cryptocurrencies aren't that important but blockchain is. The Coinbase approach, which is apparently successful, puts the lie to that notion. Why do you need an expensive and inefficient distributed ledger when you can have a cheap and efficient one provided by a trusted intermediary, like Coinbase?
Trusted intermediaries are really important and the reason why it's worth caring about financial sector deepening. Rather than being distracted by cryptocurrencies, and their inevitable march toward realizing the need for trusted intermediaries, a more fruitful line of thinking is paying attention to what trusted intermediaries are emerging and how they affect consumers, transactions and the flow of money. This was a big part of the story of MFIs success, and one which I think remains underappreciated. Telecoms providing mobile money platforms is a really interesting case, of course. So are the commerce platforms that are rapidly becoming (or already are) payment platforms: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba. And so stories like this about Amazon and this Planet Money story about Tencent and Alibaba (it's called "A Series of Mysterious Packages," how can you resist?) may not seem like they are about banking, but they are about banking.
Beyond the obvious, the reason that the emergence of non-bank but sort-of-like-a-bank trusted intermediaries is that they change the structure of the market. Here's a new paper from de Quidt, Fetzer and Ghatak on market structure and borrower welfare in microfinance, arguing that competition can yield borrower outcomes that match non-profit lending. I'm not yet convinced. And yet, the NY Times Upshot new "Marx Ratio" determines that banks are socialist collectives (that's the Matt Levine link again, I really really wish I could link to specific parts of his posts).
Speaking of market structure, here's a story about American Samoa creating the first public bank in the United States since the turn of last century. Why? I suppose you could say the lack of competition was hurting borrower welfare.
2. Digital Finance: Here's a paper on how using social pressure to encourage positive health behaviors that every MFI that uses groups in any way should read, whether they are doing anything digital or not. There's a U-shape to the curve: the most influential people in changing behavior are those that are neither too close nor too distant in the social graph.
MicroSave has a new piece that gets helpfully specific on the opportunities for using digital finance to close the inclusion gap in six Asian countries (Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam). There are also country specific reports for most of the countries. Here's something similar from the IFC on Africa. And here's something similar from IIF with a focus on data rather than delivery.
Here is Felix Salmon's interview of the last remaining founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks in the United States, as he prepares to exit. It's mostly a discussion of why it's so hard to be a good bank, while complying with regulations designed to ensure that banks remain trusted intermediaries. Here's a recent announcement from Simple about their Emergency Savings tool which promises to help people figure out the right amount of emergency savings. I'm really curious about how they are really doing that, but the company hasn't responded to my questions.
Week of May 7, 2018
1. Self-Referential Metadata: Last week's faiV included a link to an app to automatically extract data from charts. I joked it would be the most clicked link in the history of the faiV and it certainly was the most clicked link of the week, more than doubling the clicks on any other link. It was also the most clicked of the last few months. Second place was a review of The Financial Diaries, that unfortunately I suspect many people couldn't read more than the first page of (honestly, it's great, but it's not $45 for 24 hours great. And does anyone ever pay that? Why?).
In other faiV news, Gisella Kagy got in touch to let me know the link to her paper about differential profits by gender for Ghanaian tailors was the right one; and I ran into Leora Klapper who let me know that she forwards the faiV to many colleagues each week. And yes, both of those are really just an excuse to say writing the faiV often feels like shouting into the void. So if you do see stuff you like, or just appreciate the faiV generally, please do get in touch every now and then to let me know. And it's also OK to let me know when I'm getting too niche, too snarky, or you have something you think should be featured in the faiV.
2. US Inequality: It was at the Dignity and Debt Network inaugural meeting that I ran into Leora, and a bunch of other researchers working on household finance, debt and related matters. It was a sociology conference so I had to get used to a format that wasn't paper-centric, but, of course, my bias is to noticing papers. A particularly interesting one was by Barbara Kiviat and Rourke O'Brien finding that low credit scores lower the likelihood of a job offer for a female applicant and lowers the offered salary to black applicants.
One wonders how such biases play out in the gig economy. Here's a piece on the growing use of 1-day gigs by restaurants and retail. It's practices like that which can make a job guarantee emotionally appealing. Here's Annie Lowrey on the growing momentum behind (very very) vague proposals for a jobs guarantee among Democrat candidates.
3. Rotten Kin: I'm going to use that as a very tenuous jumping off point to rotten kin as a factor that I don't think gets enough attention in the political economy of job guarantees and universal basic income. At least I hear often about discrimination and racism as explanations for why people would oppose such policies (leaving aside disputes about the basic economics). But I think almost everyone has a cousin or uncle or sibling that they think it would be bad for to get a cash stipend or would abuse a job guarantee in some way. I think that plays a big part in people's skepticism, even if they don't voice it publicly because it's not a nice thing to say about your family.
Anyway, here's Munir Squires writing in VoxDev about "kinship taxes" on Kenyan firm growth finding a fifth of women and a third of men would be willing to pay, and pay a lot, to hide income from their networks. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Think also of the ways that husbands and wives buy certain goods to protect income from each other. And then think about the rotten kin tax that Indian textile firms are paying based on Bloom, Mahajan McKenzie and Roberts' work--obviously that tax is less than the perceived tax paid if you hire non-relations as managers, but still.
First Week of May, 2018
1. Microfinance, Part I (Uses of Credit): For the first time in forever, it seems there's enough new and interesting stuff on microfinance to support not only one, but a couple multiple-link items. Let's start with a useful piece that summarizes findings from several studies that have loomed large in our understanding (or questions about) of how microenterprises use credit, and apparent differences between male-owned and female-owned enterprises. I do find the framing a bit odd, as I don't know anyone who interpreted the results as "women aren't as good at running microenterprises as men" rather than, "women tend to be constrained to operating microenterprises in less profitable industries." When the newer results from Bernhardt, Field, Pande and Rigol emerged, I think the standard take was, "Households optimally allocate credit to their highest-return enterprise." So I think the intriguing thing here is not "women vs men entrepreneurs" but "maybe the industries women are concentrated in aren't less profitable after all." And that makes me think back to a paper from AEA (there's no version online that I can find, but this seems to be a significantly revised version using the same data) finding that female tailors in Ghana earn less than male tailors because they are constrained to making womens' clothes, a sector where there is more competition and lower prices.
Another use of credit for poor households is not to invest in a microenterprise but to smooth consumption when income is seasonal (or volatile for other reasons). Here's a new paper from Fink, Jack, and Masiye examining that dynamic in rural Zambia. Providing credit during the lean season affects the labor market, allowing liquidity-constrained farmers to avoid wage labor for their comparatively less-constrained neighbors, and pushes up wages. The intriguing thing here is another piece of evidence on the general equilibrium effects of microcredit via commodity (in this case, labor) markets.
2. Microfinance, Part II (Everything Else): Well, not everything else, see item 4. Access to credit and other financial services is a tricky thing--and it's not just the financial system that affects it, the justice system, criminal and civil, matters a lot too. Here's a new paper on alternative credit scoring using digital footprints--I haven't read it yet but am generally very skeptical of things like this. Grassroots Capital and CGAP are hosting a webinar on May 15th under the heading "Microfinance: Revolution or Footnote?" based on a conference last year (full disclosure, I was a participant). Of course, now I would want it to be called "Revolution, Footnote, or General Equilibrium Effects Eat Us All in the Long Run?" And applications are open for the 2018 European Microfinance Awards (until May 23) with the theme "Inclusive Finance through Technology." Whoever said the faiV didn't have news you could use?
3. Methods/Statistics/Etc: Here's even more service journalism: A tool that will convert charts into data points automatically. I actually expect this to be the most clicked link in the history of the faiV. RAs, the robots are coming for your jobs sooner than you think.
Does everyone who cares about statistics read Andrew Gelman's blog regularly? Just in case, there were several posts recently that drew my attention. One is a fairly-standard-but-always-useful post about a specific example of dubious practices, on early childhood education (which morphs into some commentary on how the field of economics deals with these issues with a bonus appearance from Guido Imbens in the comments); another is a pointer to a new paper that tries to avoid some of the more dubious practices on a topic of a lot of interest and a lot of noise--the relationship of macro-growth and child development. But the most interesting is a post about how economists tend to see the world, specifically explaining why apparent bad behavior is good, and apparent good behavior is bad. Behavior in the economics profession is the best segue I can find into this short (audio) interview with Claudia Goldin.
But back to the use and misuse of metrics and statistics. If you don't click on anything else under this item, I do think you should look at these last two links. First, a thread about how most of the world thinks about statistics--as a tool for arriving at the answer you're looking for. And a column from Justin Fox on how pro- and anti-metrics authors end up in basically the same place--measurement is hard, and is only useful if you put the effort into doing it right.
Week of April 23, 2018
1. Communications: Marc Bellemare has a new post on how to communicate research titled "The Goal of Scientific Communication Is Not to Impress But to Be Understood." To which I say, the goal of human beings is not to be understood but to impress (hence the faiV). But assuming that you aren't as Calvinist as I am, I've been collecting a few things over the last few weeks that broadly fit the theme of better communicating research and ideas. Here's an experiment on disaster relief communications testing negative and positive imagery for their effect on donations and on donors sense of that change was possible. Unfortunately, there are few conclusions to draw; these are hard experiments to run. Here's a piece from ODI on 9 things you are doing, but shouldn't in research communications. I'm guilty of at least five (with mitigating circumstances, e.g. the funders told me I had to).
But let's get specific. Here's something you should definitely not do: produce a set of guidelines for behavior that have no input from the most important people in the equation. You should also not try to write jargony, provocative headlines without really understanding the context, for instance, saying that "40% of Older Americans Will Experience Downward Mobility." Given that the standard models of retirement planning assume that everyone retiring will have a lower income (hello there Lifecycle theory!), and most people aren't close to saving enough for retirement according to those standard models, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the figure will be a lot higher than 40%. Don't try to find some way to contextualize a massive ritual sacrifice of children. And finally, definitely don't be one of these Manhattanites caught on video expressing revealed preferences for segregation and inequality, but do be like the principal at the end of the video clip and communicate your disgust in no uncertain terms.
2. Global Convergence: But not in a good way. I often think about the divergence in outcomes (or put another way, growing income and wealth inequality, falling mobility) for Americans as a convergence: for the bottom ~40% of the income distribution, the American economy looks a lot more like the economy in, say South Africa or Brazil, than the economy experience by the upper half of the distribution. That clip above is one example of how far out of reach the tools for mobility can be. Justin Fox has a story about fee-based governance in the United States--government agencies funding themselves through fines and fees. Justin makes the connection to the Gilded Age in the US, but it's a mechanism that will be very familiar to people in developing and middle-income countries. For a ray of hope on that front, you can check out Tishuara Jones, Treasurer of St. Louis, who is fighting back against fines and fees as revenue in her city.
3. Household Finance: This week I guest-taught a class at Haverford on US microfinance. In the post-discussion I learned that students prefer off-campus jobs, because Haverford pays student workers only once-a-month, and those who need the paycheck from a job during the semester, need it more frequently. That makes sense. But people on low-incomes also often prefer infrequent payments, so as to get larger lump-sums. Dairy farmers in Kenya do according to this new work from Casaburi and Macchiavello. To the convergence point earlier, this isn't a difference between the US and developing countries. The demand for income spikes among people in the US can be seen in the low take-up rates for monthly EITC payments, and the high take-up of "overwithholding." It's also evident in the fintech Even's pivot away from consumption smoothing. The bottom line is we still have a long way to go to understand optimal income volatility and we should have weak priors about the interest in and benefits of say, on-demand income or a "rainy day EITC."
Week of April 16, 2018
1. Read, Synthesize, Repeat: Two weeks ago I featured a bunch of links about new and new-ish research about cash transfers, including a synthesis by Berk Ozler which particularly draws attention to the growing evidence of negative spillovers from cash transfers. This week Justin Sandefur wrote up his own synthesis, which disagrees with Berk in important ways, and followed up with a Twitter thread summary, which includes the amazing line: "unless cash recipients literally spent the money on gasoline to set fire to their neighbors farms..." Which of course led to a response from Berk and then lots of further replies--much of which center on how to think about the scope of negative spillovers and what to do with data that doesn't seem to be entirely trustworthy. That's the job of synthesis! But there's a long way to go before there's any consensus on the right synthesis.
The site Straight Talk on Evidence has been working on, if not synthesis, at least part of the work of synthesis, sorting through lots of research on US policy interventions and whether it holds up. A few weeks ago they started a series of blog posts on what the path forward should be "when most rigorous program evaluations find disappointing effects." Here's part two with their proposed steps (I try to avoid using the word "solution" even when it's just quoting others). And here's Chris Blattman's Twitter thread response to their proposed steps.
I may have already linked this but in case I didn't, it's relevance to this conversation in particular compels me to include it: The Political Economy of RCTs. Equally I have to include this short article titled "Evidence-Based Claims About Evidence" which challenges the conventional wisdom on how long it takes for evidence to influence physician behavior.
And yes the connection is tenuous, but here's Ideas42 first ever Impact Report on their first 10 years of work. I think there remains a lot of work to be done on synthesizing behavioral science and other approaches and the real world.
2. Banking: When I first started working with Jonathan at FAI, one of the first things was helping get the book Banking the World out the door--based on work by Jonathan and others estimating that "half the world is unbanked." The World Bank's Findex database has just been updated with 2017 data, with a new report and complete data, and it now seems that the proper statement is "a third of the world is unbanked." Of course, that begs the question of what we mean by unbanked or financial inclusion, and how to think about people who have access to formal accounts but choose not to use them--often because those formal accounts aren't as useful as the alternatives (or in some cases are actively harmful). Obviously, the Findex has a lot to explore and I'm sure I'll be sharing more in the coming weeks as people try to synthesize the findings.
But coming back to that point about how to think about financial inclusion and exclusion, here's the text of a speech from N.S. Vishwanathan, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, about evolving regulation of Indian banks and stressed assets, which closes with an all-too-familiar warning: "There appears to be taking hold a herd movement among bankers to grow retail credit and the personal loan segment. This is not a risk-free segment and banks should not see it as the grand panacea for their problem riddled corporate loan book."
Meanwhile, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Mick Mulvaney has drastically cut back it's enforcement actions, apparently to zero. The latest is dropping charges and sanctions against an abusive payday lender and scaling back regulations of high-cost consumer lending. Perhaps Mick should place a call to India.
3. Philanthropy: Discussions of philanthropy would be improved if there was more synthesis of public choice economics--too often I see writing about philanthropic actors that seems to start with either an assumption of saintly altruism or evil capitalist intent in disguise. A reasonable example of something better is this new report on "what goes wrong in impact-focused projects" and finds roughly half of the "roadblocks" are funder-created obstacles.
Another example is an important set of stories about the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has become one of the largest foundations in the world, that illustrate that the world of philanthropy is even messier than most human endeavors where altruism, good intentions, power and self-interest collide. Marc Gunther, writing in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, details many accusations of abusive behavior by SVCF's leading fundraiser, who has resigned in the few days since the article was published. There was a lot of work to get the story published, as Marc details here on his own blog, but like so many other "revelations" in this season, the accusations were well-known and apparently ignored by a great many people, including allegedly by the president of SVCF, Emmett Carson. SVCF is no stranger to controversy. Though I've linked these before, as a refresher here's Marc's earlier reporting on SVCFs' role, or lack thereof, in Silicon Valley itself and an excellent piece by Phil Buchanan of CEP on how to think about community foundations' role in the complicated world of philanthropy. And here's Rob Reich (the Stanford political scientist, not the Berkeley Economist) on interrogating the power of large philanthropy.
Week of April 9, 2018
1. Global Development: Hey, does anybody remember the Millennium Villages Project? It seems an age ago in terms of development fads, now that we're all focused on cash grants and graduation programs, and according to some papers would fall into the "long-run" category. Andrew Gelman has a post about a new retrospective evaluation of the program (that he participated in), including a link to an evaluation of the evaluation. The results are surprisingly good, given what I expect most people's priors were at this point. Though I suppose the TUP evaluations should perhaps have shifted those priors in a positive direction. I guess I'm kind of surprised that the results don't seem to have gotten the attention I would have predicted. Of course, I don't think anyone has argued that the MVP should be a model for other programs since Nina Munk's book, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised.
Lant Pritchett has a list of six other things in development that people aren't paying (enough) attention to, mostly variations on the continuing large gap between even the lower part of the income distribution in rich countries and the upper part of the distribution in poor countries.
Lant's first point is about the huge gains from moving. Here's a piece from a few weeks ago about the lack of geographic mobility, specifically rural to urban migration, in the United States where the overall tone is exasperation at these benighted people who stay in small towns (and ruin things for everyone else; it's an interview with Robert Wuthnow about his new book). It caught my eye because I can't imagine something like this being written about rural people in developing countries (without touching off a lot of blowback). But perhaps we should see more stuff like this about all forms of poor-to-rich geographic mobility. Speaking of those rural people, here's a new paper from Marc Bellemare about one of the dynamics that may be keeping the poorest people in rural areas (at least in Madagascar)--the intensification of income from agriculture.
2. Jobs: Last week I linked to the recent study of scheduling practices at The Gap that found that encouraging managers to set more stable schedules for retail employees led to higher productivity and sales for the firm. The exact mechanism for increased sales isn't completely clear, but it appears that managers shifted hours to more experienced workers, who unsurprisingly were more productive. While the study is encouraging overall--stable schedules are better for (most) workers and for employers--it also has a dark tinge. To see why, consider this Atlantic article about the future of jobs at Walmart (which, to its great credit, was well ahead of The Gap in experimenting with more stable schedules for its hourly workers, and other efforts to stabilize workers income). The macro trend is toward fewer jobs, at least in terms of how we used to define that term, for less-skilled and less-experienced employees, and declining job quality for those people. That's been happening at many companies (think of outsourcing of janitorial, security and similar jobs) for a long time. It seems an awful lot like what I understand has happened in European labor markets which are more regulated--stable jobs are limited, more workers, particularly the young pushed into contingent labor contracts with limited benefits, stability or security. From a distance this is fascinating: similar outcomes from radically different processes. But from a policy perspective it's frightening. In the economic development world, we've been talking for a long time about how to move more people into formal employment, like in developed economies. Meanwhile the developed economies are making great progress moving people into informal employment, like in developing countries. Maybe I should have called this item Global Undevelopment.
And to play to the academic part of my readership for a moment, here's a piece about how every effort to create better incentives in academic jobs makes things worse. I remain baffled at the general assumption in economics that managers know what they are doing, given the management they experience on a daily basis. While I can't vouch for the management abilities at the Open Philanthropy Project, chances are if you're a reader of the faiV you, or someone you know might be interested in these job openings.
3. MicroDigitalFinance: Is a neologism a step too far? Probably. But check out CFI's fellows program research agenda. There's a whole lot of "microdigital" there. Interestingly, to me at least, is that you could copy and paste these questions into a research agenda for the US financial services marketplace and no one would bat an eye, especially the ones about the changing nature of work.
Week of April 2, 2018
1. Global Development: To start us off, how about some rain on the "rising Kenyan middle class" parade? The core point--that gains from rising incomes that don't translate into durable assets can rapidly be erased, a perspective that should sound familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of anti-poverty policy in the US.
But the real parade in global development in recent years has been on the value of delivering cash to poor households. This is a train that's been picking up steam for a long while. I would date the current push back to the first studies of Progresa/Opportunidades, the Mexican conditional cash transfer program. Momentum has steadily built around both the positive impact of cash transfers--that recipients don't waste the money, that they use the money productively--and dropping conditions. That momentum was built on many studies, but probably the two most well known in international circles are Blattman, Fiala and Martinez on cash transfers in Uganda, and Haushofer and Shapiro/GiveDirectly in Kenya. Both showed significant gains by recipients of unconditional cash.
Both of those papers were about relatively short-term effects. Both studies included longer-term follow-ups. And you know what's coming: the large positive effects seem to have disappeared in the medium term. Berk Ozler of the World Bank is currently playing the role of Deng (it's the closest I could get geographically) with two lengthy blog posts. The first, keying off comments from Chris Blattman in the recent Conversations with Tyler, but really delving into the recently released update to the Haushofer and Shapiro/GiveDirectly update is the important one for non-specialists. The second is very useful for understanding the specific details of interpretation. The posts also kicked off a number of useful Twitter conversations (here, here, here, here and here, though that's just a sample; just scroll through Chris's and Berk's timelines for more). Berk's first post also takes on the role that academics have played in stoking that momentum and is worth a close read.
I think it's also important to think through what is happening with cash transfers in light of not only of other studies of cash (like this one finding positive effects on the personality of Cherokee Native American kids whose families receive cash that was just officially published) but also other interventions. Deworming is one example--one big source of the controversy over the effects of deworming is that there isn't a medium-term biological effect to explain the the long-term economic effects. The Moving to Opportunity study is another--no short-term or medium-term gains, only long-term ones. And I have to note that the Native American paper is a frustrating example of Berk's critique of the role academics can play in raising expectations too high--the paper's title and abstract simply reference a large positive effect of cash transfers with no indication of when (now? 10 years ago? 30 years ago?), where or who the participants are, or even the size or mechanism of the transfers.
Week of March 19, 2018
1. Household Finance, Debt Specifically: This week I had the chance to talk about the moral dimensions of debt with Fred Wherry, as part of Aspen EPIC's focus on consumer debt in the US (and there are more conversations about debt before and after in that video). One of the things that doesn't get mentioned in the video is that the ancestor of mine who was rescued from debtor's prison later became the official Collector for Jersey City. It's a topic that fascinates me because attitudes toward debt vary so widely across time, culture, context and individual. It often seems like perspectives on debt are pulled from the Wheel of Morality. Just the selective use of the words "credit" and "debt" could be fodder for 100,000 words or more, much less the tension between the lack of access to credit coinciding with troubling debt burdens in many contexts.
To get up to speed on the current situation with consumer debt in the United States, you couldn't ask for a better overview than Aspen EPIC's just published primer. Well, you could ask for one, but given the gaps in the underlying data, you wouldn't get it. And to push some more moral buttons, here's a profile of one of the most influential figures in consumer debt today: Dave Ramsey. If you don't know who that is, you really do need to read the profile.
2. Microfinance and Digital Finance: I suppose I'm sending a message by increasingly conflating these two categories. This piece from NextBillion on the need for Indian MFIs to digitize at least gives me an excuse this week. But while I figure out what message I'm sending (or at least intending to send), here are a couple of recent pieces about digital accounts helping people save more. First, a paper from the job market that I missed about M-Pesa boosting savings among those whose alternatives were most costly. And a new paper about an experiment with female entrepreneurs in Tanzania finding digital savings accounts boosted savings rates. My priors aren't shifted much by these, but they are shifted some.
To maintain some strategic ambiguity, here's a new paper that fights the digital invasion--there's nothing less digital than grain storage. Providing farmers with a way to communally store grain at harvest has high take-up and as a result were able to sell grain later at a higher price. An intervention to allow individual cash savings for inputs was less successful, though possibly because there wasn't much margin to improve on.
3. Methods and Economics: It took a lot of willpower (though apparently not ego-depleting) not to put this item first, but I worry that my excitement over things like this is not normative for the faiV readership. But for those of you in this niche, here's a new comment from Guido Imbens on the Cartwright and Deaton critique of RCTs (and if you prefer a simpler version, here's my interview of Deaton for Experimental Conversations which gives an overview of most of the issues). To give you a flavor of Imbens perspective: "Nothwithstanding the limitations of experimentation in answering some questions, and the difficulties in implementation, these developments have greatly improved the credibility of empirical work in economics compared to the standards prior to the mid-eighties, and I view this as a major achievement by these researchers."
Imbens places RCTs within "the credibility revolution" in empirical economics (which of course is the crux of the debate--how much do RCTs improve credibility?). The credibility revolution, in turn, has played a big role in the growth of empirical economics compared to theory and econometrics. Here's Sylvain Chabe-Ferret with an overview of "the empirical revolution in Economics", some thoughts on the path forward and a treasure trove of links. I have to note here, for those not so enmeshed in the details, that while Deaton is a critic of RCTs, he is a part of the credibility/empirical revolutions through his careful and detailed work with surveys.
Finally, here's something form the Royal Economic Society with the headline "Tweeting Economists Are Less Effective Communicators Than Scientists". I haven't read it yet but how could I not link it when it has such an exquisite combination of direct and implied slights on economists?
