Part of our mission at FAI is to frame policy and regulatory issues by synthesizing evidence from existing research and generating new evidence where it's lacking.
Editor's Note: Of particular note, this Tuesday (September 15th) at 10am Eastern there is a special edition of faiVLive in Spanish covering Digital Financial Services in Latin America. I'll be hosting with Gabriela Zapata moderating, and Kiki DelValle, Barbara Magnoni, and Xavier Faz will be joining us. Register here.
I apologize in advance if the final links on resilience undermine your resilience at the beginning of the week.
–Tim Ogden
Read MoreEditor's Note: I feel like the typical "everyone is gone in August" thing hasn't been happening this year, but there is so much that's different that I can't really tell. And while I took some time off in July, and even went somewhere, it didn't feel like a vacation since there was still so much effort needed figuring out what the boys and I could do in a time of distancing and lockdowns. I hope you have had some time mentally away, but you know, not all of your time mentally away.
--Tim Ogden
1. Microfinance: It's not often that I have a plain microfinance item these days, but there are some important specifically microfinance points of interest this week. First it's the 10th anniversary edition of the Microfinance Barometer. There's an interesting piece in it on the evolution of the Barometer's coverage, and one on "digitalisation: risk or opportunity?" which I automatically like because of the framing. Also, there's an article asking whether financial inclusion and microfinance are the same thing, which I was kind of taken aback by since I mostly hear these days about whether there is a meaningful and useful difference between inclusion and health. I didn't know anyone was still equating microfinance with inclusion. But perhaps the most interesting thing is a small snippet of data on Portfolio at Risk: the trend is definitely upward toward 7% PAR30, which is well above the historic range of "good practice" microcredit. Is it a sign of MFIs learning to take more risk? Or that they are being pressured by digital entrants to be more aggressive? Or something else?
This week the European Microfinance Platform released Financial Inclusion Compass 2019, the report on their annual survey of trends in financial inclusion (note, not trends in microfinance). You'll hear more about Compass in coming weeks as the eMFP team will be taking over the faiV one week soon. In my quick initial look through the thing I found most interesting is the divergence between how MFIs and investors are rating various issues. Specifically, MFIs still put human resources issues at the top of their list of concerns--it's still a problem attracting, training and retaining staff apparently. Which should raise questions of digital security: if MFIs can't retain basic banking staff, what hope do they have of attracting and retaining cybersecurity staff? (Yes, I'm going to keep banging on this drum for a long time to come.)
Speaking of digital finance, one more thing for this week: MicroSave's full report on the state of digital credit in Kenya is full of fascinating (and scary) details. Like, "Between 2016 and 2018, "86% of loans that Kenyans took were digital in nature." Yes, indeed, it sounds like the MFIs are under significant pressure. But so you don't think I'm letting my confirmation bias run totally rampant, here's a recent blog post from MicroSave highlighting the positive trends in digital credit in Kenya, which include rising loan quality (that is, if you consider repayment rates a pure measure of loan quality; sorry, not sorry). Especially since there is also a new report from FSDKenya "evaluating the conduct and practice of digital lending" there. It includes fun stories like relatives of borrowers being threatened with being blacklisted at credit agencies if they don't compel repayment. Loan quality is definitely improving.
2. Migration: Did I mention I have a new paper with Michael Clemens on reframing the migration research agenda? Oh yes, I'm sure I did, but nevertheless, here it is again.
But there is also some brand new stuff. First, here's a look at the impact of massive out-migration from Galicia since 1860. The initial outflow lowered literacy rates for about a decade but then the trend reversed with large gains in human capital at origin that have persisted for more than a century. The mechanism: both remittances from the migrants to fund education back in Galicia and the transmission of norms about the importance of education.
There's also a new study of the impact of the end of the Bracero program which allowed Mexicans to migrate for agricultural jobs in the United States beginning during World War II. When the program ended, there was a sudden massive drop in migrants. What happened? Well, awhile ago, Michael, Ethan Lewis and Hannah Postel had a paper showing there was no effect on employment or wages for native-born workers. This new paper by Muly San explains why: large investment in technology to reduce the labor needed to harvest the crops that Bracero's had been employed harvesting (and not in other crops.)
Drawing heavily on Michael's research there's also a new special report from The Economist making the case for more migration to make the world a better place. And it doesn't even include how migrants seem to be the best defenders America's institutions have right now.
And here's a story about how the huge inflow of Venezuelan refugees into Colombia has made it the fastest growing country on the continent--and apparently about the most stable country on the continent right now.
Meanwhile, if you're wondering what's wrong with America you're not alone. Here's a partial answer that I've featured before: Americans keep setting new records for immobility.
1. Good Economics: I’m pretty jealous of the luck that the editor who signed Esther and Abhijit to write a new book with a big picture view of economics and development and managed to have it scheduled to come out just a few weeks after they won the Nobel has (or alternatively I’m not jealous at all of the eternity of suffering they will have from selling their soul to make this happen). It is pretty remarkable timing regardless of how it came about.
The official release isn't until later this week, but there’s already a good amount of stuff out there, and the book seems likely to generate a lot of conversation. Here’s an excerpt that outlines their perspective on migration (it’s good and there should be more of it). Here’s an excerpt of their perspective on trade (it’s not as good as you’ve heard). Here’s a thread from David McKenzie contrasting the two.
I’m told a review copy is headed my way, and if so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the book in future weeks.
2. Global Development: It feels like quite some time since I’ve been able to feature some big picture things happening in the development space. So here’s a round-up of some pretty diverse things on that front.
David Malpass has been in charge at the World Bank for long enough to start seeing some changes. Here’s a perspective on how the annual meetings were different this time around. And here’s a piece on how Malpass seems to be trying to shift toward more attention at the individual country level than on global or regional issues. I guess no one will be surprised if the Bank does little on the climate change front while he is in charge.
It’s been well more than a decade of pretty remarkable economic growth on average in sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries that has meant substantial progress on reducing poverty headcounts; in others not so much. Via Ken Opalo here’s a paper that proposes an explanation for the pretty bi-modal distribution of countries that have made progress on poverty and those that haven’t. Spoiler: Acemoglu and Robinson and those who like path dependence stories probably agree.
Bolivia is in crisis right now with real uncertainty about what the next few weeks, much less months, will hold. It would be interesting to see a systematic review of outcomes for countries where there have been coups and ones where there's been "sort of" a coup. But Bolivia is in remarkably better shape than some of the other countries in Latin America that elected populist lefitsts around the same time. Here’s a Twitter conversation between Justin Sandefur, Dany Bahar and Alice Evans (and later Pseudoerasmus weighs in) on the pretty unique set of economic policies and macro-conditions that account for that.
China’s efforts to play a large role in developing countries has been a topic for awhile now. But there’s still a lot of questions about what exactly China’s influence and impact on developing countries will be. Here’s a CGD piece on what the Belt and Road Initiative will look like in 10 years.
Russia is the new scary story in African "investment." A few weeks ago Russia hosted a summit with leaders of African countries. So what does Russian involvement in Africa look like? Here's a claim that Russia is sending mercenaries to Libya with the intention of increasing migrant flows to Europe to destabilize countries there. What are the chances that the Banerjee and Duflo chapter on migration will be wildly influential and cause the Russian strategy to backfire?
On the migration front, here’s Michael Clemens and Jimmy Graham on how demographics are going to change the flows of migrants to the United States from Central America--I don’t think they factor in the possible impact of Russian mercenaries.
3. Digital Finance: Here are some important stories about digital finance that you may not have noticed. If that sounds like a familiar opening, well, yes, OK, I’m going to hammer on this theme for a bit--be prepared it’s likely to be a regular fixture, at least until I feel like it’s gets regular enough attention in conversations about fintech, mobile money and other things digital.
Nikkei--the Japanese financial news organization and owner of the FT--lost $29 million in a phishing scam. UniCredit--the Italian bank--exposed 3 million customer records in a data breach. Web.com, one of the largest domain name registrars in the world, was hacked a few weeks ago and exposed 22 million records. What'sApp was also hacked, apparently by an Israeli firm that proceeded to spy on 1400 people in 20 countries.
Anyone feeling confident that microfinance institutions or even major mobile money providers are really immune to these security breaches that are affecting even highly sophisticated companies spending multi-millions on cybersecurity? If you are, please print out this tweet and tape it to your monitor.
OK, here's something not on the security question: a paper on the economic effects of money based on Spanish history: whether or not shipments of silver made it back to Spain from the New World had a big impact on the literal supply of money. So what does this have to do with digital finance? I think it's a useful explanation for the Jack and Suri finding about the growth effects of mobile money in Kenya.
1. US Household Finance (and Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy): If you've been paying attention to global news, you have no doubt deduced a pattern that many are remarking on: mass protests in many countries that are linked in more than trivial ways to the cost of living, corrupted economies and frustration with a subverted political process: Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, Hong Kong are just a few. Here's the New York Times on that pattern with discussion of similar situations in nearly 10 more countries.
In the sense that these episodes of mass unrest stem back to "pocketbook" issues the United States is an outlier--not that the cost of living and unequal access to opportunity aren't issues--but that they haven't yet lead to mass uprisings. There are lots of reasons for that of course, including relatively low unemployment and at least some consistent economic growth. But the underlying issues just aren't that different. Here's a new report from the JP Morgan Chase Institute on how much savings US households need to weather the typical ups and downs in their income and spending needs. There's a lot to dig into in the report, and I'm still not convinced we understand volatility enough to offer prescriptions, but this is a big step in the right direction. The report finds that US families need 6 weeks of take-home income to weather a simultaneously income dip and expense spike, and that 65 percent of households don't have that.
For a more personal take on how budgets are being squeezed, here's the NYT with a in-depth look at four households' budgets.
2. SMEs: The way I see things there are two research questions at the top of the agenda: 1) What distinguishes SMEs/entrepreneurs that grow, and create net new jobs and long-lived profitable businesses (I honestly care less about high growth because I care more about short- and medium-term income effects), and 2) What are the barriers specifically for women in becoming one of those types of entrepreneurs.
There are two new-ish papers I came across this week, one on each of those questions. First, here's a paper that tries to establish some objective criteria for distinguishing between "necessity" and "opportunity" entrepreneurs, using their prior work history as the main data source. Using data from Germany and the US they find that opportunity entrepreneurs start more growing businesses (surprise!) and that 80 to 90% of entrepreneurs are opportunity entrepreneurs. The relevance to places outside of a handful of developed countries with well-functioning and tightly-integrated labor markets notwithstanding, I don't find the approach particularly convincing. I can think of lots of different ways to conceptualize what job history means in terms of "opportunity" vs. "necessity" and it doesn't take into account that a lot of "opportunity" entrepreneurs are likely just wrong about the opportunity (or their necessity). But it's a useful paper for thinking about these issues.
The second paper is a new working paper from Seema Jayachandran that I just came across this morning, so I haven't had a chance to really look at it yet. But based on the abstract, it's definitely worth taking a look at. She "reviews the recent literature in economics on small-scale entrepreneurship (microentrepreneurship) in low-income countries" with "special attention to unique issues that arise with female entrepreneurship."
3. Digital Finance: Here are some important stories about digital finance that you may not have noticed. A major German manufacturer is still down more than a week after being hit by a ransomware attack. Seventeen iPhone apps have been removed from the app store after researchers discovered they were using a clever way to hide and deliver malware. Two of the most popular VPN providers in the world were hacked recently. A new information-gathering trojan is rapidly gaining popularity with hackers, in part because it's "malware as a service" where you can rent server space and get technical support all for just $200 a month.
1. Jobs: I've written a good bit here on the "Great Convergence" from the perspective of financial inclusion--that the US and middle-income countries have more in common in that domain than they have ever had--but another version of the "Great Convergence" is the common focus on jobs in countries across the per-capita income spectrum.
It's useful to put the current convergence in historical perspective--the recognition that creating jobs was critical and that "national champion" industrial development was not creating them played a large role in the development of the microfinance movement. The failure of microcredit to produce much beyond self-employment alternatives to casual labor has brought job creation, and especially job creation through SMEs, back to the top of the agenda of international development. At the same time, the failure of richer economies to produce very many "quality" jobs in the 10 years since the Great Recession (and arguably since the 1970s) or for the foreseeable future has put the question of jobs at the top of the list of concerns for policymakers in those countries.
Paddy Carter, the director of research for CDC (UK, not US), and Petr Sedlacek have a new report on how DFIs and social investors should think about job creation that lays out some of the issues (e.g. boosting productivity can both create and destroy jobs) quite nicely. MIT's "Work of the Future Task Force" also has a new report, this more from the perspective of policymakers in wealthier countries, with a call to focus on job quality more than job quantity. Stephen Greenhouse has a new book on dignity at work, which of course has a lot to do with job quality. Here's a talk he gave recently at Aspen's Economic Opportunities Program.
Seema Jayachandran has a new working paper on a specific part of the jobs conversation: how social norms limit women's labor market participation and what might be done about that. For me it also opens the question about microcredit-driven self-employment being a higher "dignity" job for women in many contexts than the jobs that are available to them otherwise. More on that in a moment.
2. Household Finance: I don't have a lot of links here, just some thoughts from conversations in the last few days. But to kick things off, Felix Salmon had a nice gibe at financial literacy this week that had my confirmation bias going. But in hindsight, I actually disagree: teaching financial literacy actually doesn't seem to be that hard based on the many papers that show that running a class leads to passing a financial literacy test. The hard part is making higher financial literacy pay off in terms of changed behavior. But there I agree with Felix's basic point: higher financial literacy doesn't lead to improved decision making for the poor or the wealthy. The wealthy just have more structure and protection (both formal in terms of regulation and practices at private firms who know better than to routinely screw profitable customers, and informal in terms of slack and cushion) from bad choices. On the flip side, Joshua Goodman has a new paper in the Journal of Labor Economics that finds that more compulsory high school math leads African-American students to complete more math coursework and to higher paying jobs (there's a nice little estimate that the return to additional math courses makes up half of the gains from an additional year of school).
Part one of "more on that in a moment" is that Seema with a rockstar list of development economists (Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer Moore) has another new paper on whether access to, deposits into and training on using a personal bank account affects women's labor supply and gender norms. They find that it does increase women's labor supply and shifts norms to be more accepting of women working. Here's the indispensible Lyman Stone with a somewhat skeptical take on the interpretation of the data.
Finally, in a conversation with Northern Trust this week about their financial coaching work (see a recent summary here) a really fascinating insight came up: people in the coaching programs seem to have much more success when "saving" is framed as "debt reduction" than when it's framed as "saving." These sort of things always grab my attention because Jonathan's paper Borrowing to Save was a seminal piece for my interest and thinking in financial inclusion. But it also got me thinking: what would happen if retirement savings programs were framed as debt + loss aversion? Specifically, if when you started a job, the employer said: "I'm loaning you $10K, deposited into an IRA and you owe me $x monthly, until you pay it off--and if you don't I take it back." Obviously you couldn't run an experiment like that in the US because of regulations, but is there somewhere you could? Maybe someone has already done it? Let me know if you have any thoughts.
1. Digital Finance: Is a tide turning on digital credit? Old hands in the microfinance world like MicroSave and CGAP have been highlighting concerns about digital credit for the last few years, but the non-specialist community hasn't seemed to notice until recently. In late August Bloomberg had a quick hit piece with an eyebrow-raising headline, "This Nobel-Prize Winning Idea is Instead Piling Debt on Millions," which is likely the way the general public will perceive this despite the protests of insiders that telecoms/fintechs making instant loans at high rates with minimal customer engagement doesn't have much in common with traditional microcredit. A more serious treatment,"Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah" was published in the Boston Review the same week, though it's frustrating in its own ways, notably the lack of engagement with the global/historical context of small dollar lending or with the research from financial diaries.
In both articles there are two additional issues that I wish received more attention. First, the value of liquidity management. The authors of the Boston Review piece, Emma Park and Kevin Donovan (both historian/anthropologists), spend a good deal of time talking about the "zero-balance economy" creating a situation where consumers can be exploited without engaging on the need for services to manage liquidity when you have low and volatile incomes. Second, the kind of default rates being hinted at in these articles raise serious questions about the business models and sustainability of digital lenders. Tala, one of the larger digital credit providers in Kenya (and elsewhere) just raised another $110 million. How much of that money is covering losses? I would love to see some analysis of what sustainable default rates are for digital credit.
Shifting gears a bit, the reason that the Kenya specifically and East Africa more generally remain in the spotlight on digital finance is the ubiquity of access. But ubiquity can't be assumed and in general I would say not enough attention is being paid to what happens when ubiquity fails. Here I don't mean places where everyone knows service is unreliable, but places and times where service is unexpectedly unavailable. Here's a story about the problems that can create in the US with ZipCar customers stranded in the "wilderness" because of a lack of signal leaves them unable to unlock or start the vehicles. More seriously, though, is the concern when access is limited because of political reasons. Here's a story about the rise in government-directed internet shutdowns. Of course there is the big concern of how these shutdowns would affect people who have adopted digital finance and find themselves unable to spend. But I also wonder if Tala investors have priced in the risk to the business model of internet shutdowns.
Internet shutdowns are a blunt tool. We should also be concerned about more fine-grained tools in the hands of governments or private companies. I'm old enough to remember when one of the highlighted "benefits" of digital finance was that it created an audit trail of transactions. Here's a story about how much data about you leaks to unknown parts of the internet when you use the Amazon Prime card and the Apple Card. And finally, here's a new report on cash as a public good from IMTFI, sponsored by the International Currency Association, which I am fascinated to discover exists (though I'm even more fascinated to discover the International Banknote Designers Association, which is one of its members).
2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: There is of course a lot of overlap between concerns about digital finance and privacy and digital everything and privacy. One of the standard mantras of those gathering and selling data is that much of it is anonymized, so we shouldn't be concerned. But, of course, not so much. That's not just a concern in the US, because digital data-gathering is becoming a thing worldwide. Here's a plea to stop "stop surveillance humanitarianism." And here's a story about how a high-tech surveillance approach to improving disaster response turns out to have not been such a good idea (spoiler: garbage in/garbage out).
One of the major concerns about the use of algorithms in these situations is the garbage in/garbage out problem--combined with the gee-whiz veneer that technology provides obscuring that problem. I'm generally skeptical of that argument as a whole, because my experience is that people are far less likely to trust an algorithm than a human being (In some sense I wrote a whole book about it in a different application: the bogus fears that Toyotas were suddenly accelerating and trying to kill people). But there are other forms that algorithmic discrimination can take. Here's a story about a new US Housing and Urban Development regulation that would exempt landlords from responsibility for the discriminatory results of their screening practices as long as they don't understand the algorithm, which y'know is a given.
Finally, there is a new documentary about the 2016 US election, the Brexit referendum, Facebook/Cambridge Analytica, etc. called The Great Hack. Here's a piece about 7 things the documentary gets wrong which I find pretty convincing.
1. The Great (Household Finance) Convergence: I've been teasing this for awhile and now it's finally out: my essay for Aspen's Financial Security Program laying out the convergence between the US and developing, especially middle-income, countries especially when it comes to financial inclusion. The essay also highlights areas where mutual learning and collaboration should prove particularly fruitful. While you're there check out the rest of Aspen FSP's work on financial inclusion and keep an eye out for my next essay on "Reinvigorating the Financial Inclusion Agenda" (or, y'know, just wait until it shows up in the faiV; or you could check out this piece I did for CDC (UK) on the value of investing in financial system development).
Now the work for that essay was done a while ago, but the evidence for the convergence thesis (and it's related "corrupted economy" thesis) keeps coming. The past few weeks there were several stories in this vein. For instance, the growing number of American families relying on debt to pay their bills. Sorry, I meant the growing number of Russian families relying on debt to pay their bills. Sorry, I meant the growing number of post-retirement Americans relying on debt to pay their bills and being forced into bankruptcy.
2. Moving to Convergence?/Evidence-Based Policy: Here's a different area of convergence--my interests in the Great Convergence and in evidence-based policy in general and the RCT movement in particular. Part of the argument of the Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy is that the bottom 40% of the American income distribution faces an economy characterized by limited opportunity, with poor jobs, poor education, poor healthcare and housing that closely resembles the economies of middle-income countries. Escaping from these circumstances requires something akin to winning the lottery (Oh, did you hear about Virginia's new program for automatic purchases of lottery tickets? Set it and forget it!). People do win, but it's hard to justify the mental, physical, emotional and economic investment in hard work and building human capital when you are facing a lottery economy (and frequently witness things like this which don't seem to horrify very many people beyond Paddy Carter).
Perhaps you heard about or read the new paper from Chetty et al. on an experiment to revive the Moving to Opportunity program that showed next-generation benefits(but not much in terms of short-term benefits) from moving from poor neighborhoods to wealthier neighborhoods. The results from the experiment were met with a good bit of enthusiasm--here's Nick Kristof, and here's Dylan Matthews.
But the whole thing leaves me pretty uncomfortable for four reasons. One, the whole thing really is a lottery. Jake Vigdor does a good job in this thread of laying out the issues. First, the underlying program is literally a lottery. In fact, all housing assistance in Seattle is the functional equivalent of lottery. So to benefit from the program you would have had to win the lottery of applying for housing assistance at the right time, when there were slots open, and then when the lottery to get one of these vouchers specifically for this type of move.
Second, the program isn't an anti-poverty program as they are traditionally conceived of--it's a test of a program to encourage people who win the double lottery to follow through and actually move to higher-income neighborhood. It turns out that a remarkably small number of people who get housing vouchers like this actually use them--see above on the difficulty of motivating action in a lottery economy. The program works on its own terms--it significantly increases the percentage of people who actually move. But the anti-poverty effects in the theory of change won't be felt until the children of these movers become adults--at least 10 to 15 years from now.
Which raises the third issue. To really consider this an anti-poverty success you have to believe that the things that made the high-income neighborhoods in Seattle good for generational mobility 20 years ago, remain true today, AND that the labor market faced by today's kids will be same in 10 to 15 years further into the future. Those seem to me to be large assumptions.
It's not just that they seem so, the fourth reason is that they are large assumptions. Because the underlying mechanisms that lead to next-generation income mobility haven't been identified in any meaningful way. Other work by Chetty et al has documented the clear existence of high-mobility and low-mobility neighborhoods in the US--that work is a big part of what informs my views on the Great Convergence/Corrupted Economy. But it doesn't make it clear why the good neighborhoods are good, and therefore you have to believe that those factors are invariant over time, which maybe you shouldn't.
Here's the connection to evidence-based policy, and the fourth : this work and the reactions to it seem to me to be a much clearer example of the criticisms of RCTs by folks like Lant Pritchett, Angus Deaton, Glenn Harrison and Martin Ravallion than anything I've seen in the economic development space. You've got black boxes, large unexamined assumptions, a suspension of disbelief due to the methodology, and ultimately the possibility of gains so small (e.g. once you narrow from the winners of the lottery to the people who follow through to the kids who benefit; and all of this is just in one county in the whole country) that you should say, "so what?" instead of cheering.
By the way if you're interested in a different critique of this body of work, and other takes on economic mobility in the US, check out this thread from Scott Winship.
Wrapping up on the evidence-based policy front, it turns out that policy-makers have a lot of behavioral biases.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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