Week of April 22, 2013

A guide to articles, papers and blogs we've been reading (and a few we've been writing) over the past few weeks. Let us know if we've missed anything important via the comments section.

• The rich got richer. Everyone else...didn't. New report on 2009-2011 wealth this week from Pew Research
• Do schooling effects of cash transfer programs vary by poverty levels? It depends via @WorldBank
• Learning from cross-disciplinary impact evaluation: the Family Rewards CCT program in New York City via @WorldBank
• Open Letter from mobilemoney expert to conference organisers telling them to end obsession with MPesa 
• Geek Heretic explains why technology can't solve the poverty problem via @TheHumanosphere HT@aidwatch
• "Financial literacy is a bunch of hooey" in the Guardian's Money Blog
• Flaws Are Cited in a Landmark Study on Debt and Growth via @nytimes
• Can a little sugar turn people into better financial decision-makers? working paper from Kuhn, Kuhn &Villeval
• Why don't people buy microinsurance? Trust and liquidity constraints are 2 reasons among many. 
• Event: Microfinance's lessons for impact investing panel at Microlumbia's conference May 3 featuring FAI's Timothy Ogden

Week of April 8, 2013

Mostly blogs and articles we've been perusing over the past few weeks.

• This clip  has great graphics to show the world's unequal wealth distribution via @owenbarder
• FAI Archive: Research by Jonathan Morduch and Barabara Kiviat re: state of U.S. financial literacy (April is financial literacty month)
• Health Insurance reduces borrowing and increases consumption 
• New DFID report synthesizing info on microcredit and ultrapoor 
• U.S. Taxcode isn't as progressive as you think 
• Anyone interested in randomized trials in development should read this. "Scaling up" not a footnote to "what works?" 
• Economist Sendhil Mullainathan asks leading thinkers what's the question in your field you most dread being asked

Week of February 18, 2013

Here are the articles and blogs we've been perusing over the past few weeks. Let us know if we have missed any essential must-reads in that time via comments.

• Cash transfers vs. microloans on the GiveWell blog
• Mexico's Housing Development --where poor people won't live (video)
• IFC reports huge unmet demand for microfinance 
• The state of microcredit by David Roodman 
• The end of absolute poverty is closer than you think by Charles Kenny (in the Globe and Mail) 
• How the internet reinforces inequality
• Inequality, not poor schools, explains low U.S. test scores 
• Income inequality in the US-- check your block with this interactive map
• Life at the margins of America's financial mainstream 
• Can the Payday Loan be Reinvented?

Week of September 10, 2012

This is our late summer/back to school edition of Links We Like. Let us know if we missed anything critical over the summer!

• Tim Ogden on "Managing the Difficult Trade-offs in Microfinance Regulation" 
• The US Financial Diaries Project is Hiring  
•  An anthropological perspective on Pay for Performance HT‏@KarenGrepin
•  "The Aid Fungibility Debate and Medical Journal Peer Review" by David Roodman
• Dan Rozas on "Can Borrowers be Trusted to Reschedule their Own Loans?"
• "A network view of economic development" by Cesar Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann
• US Census Burea publishes its annual report on US income, poverty and health insurance coverage 
• Tim Harford on the results from the world's largest RCT - "Cash on Delivery for the World's Poorest" 
• BBC: "How Technology Democratized Development "
• Minnesota Post: "The problem with asking Are you Better Off" and ignoring counterfactuals
• Global remittance flows beautifully visualized
• Owen Barder's Complexity and development (presentation and podcast)
• "Conversations on Complexity: A Tribute to Elinor Ostrom" by Ben Ramalingam
• NYT: Churches go cashless
• The Atlantic: "The rise of economic segregation" -- Mapping income inequality in America

Week of July 16, 2012

We haven’t posted an update on stuff we’ve been reading for quite some time. So, here’s a round-up of some to the articles, blogs and papers we’ve been reading. 

• Shamika Ravi on the Microfinance Bill 2012: A Move Towards Responsible Microfinance in India 
• The Wall Street Journal on the Indian government’s introduction of a bill to regulate microfinance 
• Andhra Pradesh government doesn't like India's federal government’s microfinance bill, and seeks changes 
• Hope Springs a Trap, an Economist article on microfinance for the ultra-poor. 
• David Roodman talks about whether microfinance works and his new book, Due Diligence, with Owen Barder at the Development Drums
• Timothy Ogden on women, banking and financial inclusion  and why the social component matters 
• Digicel Debuts First Non-Bank Mobile Payment System 
• Segmentation for Innovation: Understanding the Financial Service Needs of the Poor in Mexico 
• Financial Inclusion and Stability--what does research show? Scary how little we really know. 
• The future is here: An innovative bank that doesn't treat its poorest customers as a different species 
• The Economist: Banking in the developing world: The poor are different 
• "Is Behavioral Finance Relevant to (Consumer Protection) Policymaking?" 
• The Financial Literacy Movement: Some recent evidence about financial education 
• Financial Literacy: A Review of the Literature 
• The New York Times "Bits" column on the microinsurance revolution
• Esther Duflo and the "Benefits of Hope" 
• The 1 Percent’s Problem: Joseph Stiglitz on why plutocrats should care about inequality in Vanity Fair 
• Harvard Kennedy School Study: "Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys When Moving Out of Poor Neighborhoods"
• Economics from the neck down: "The Biology of Bubble and Crash" 
• French intellectual Pierre Bourdieu on photography, seeing and Algeria’s poor 
• Chris Berg on Remittances Dominate Aid Yet Remain Unspoken 
• Charles Kenney on the "Big Mac Theory of Development" featuring findings from new paper from Princeton Economist Orley Ashenfelter 
• The Global Findex Database: The World Bank’s Development Research Group, has constructed the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database as the first public database of indicators that consistently measure people’s use of financial products across economies and over time. 
• Givewell.org’s review of the Millenium Village Program is a good overview of the concerns raised 
• Social Investment: A Review of the Literature 
• Marc Bellemare writes on "Replication, Publication Bias & Negative Findings" 
• The rise of microcurrencies changing how we buy and our societal relations 
• Supporting the U.S. Working Poor Thru Policy Initiatives in Delaware

Week of March 12, 2012

A sampling of what we've been reading this week from around the web:

• FAI Researcher Jonathan Bauchet on "Details Matter: Insurance Makes Sense, So Why Isn’t it More Popular?"
• Nickeled and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich on "American Poverty, 50 years Later"

Some TED Talks that you may not have heard:

• Sendhil Mullainathan on "Solving Social Problems with a Nudge" 
• Esther Duflo on "Social Experiments to fight Poverty" 
• Eldar Shafir: "Living under Scarcity" 
• Hans Rosling's "New Insights on Poverty" 
• Nokia Researcher Jan Chipchase on how people interact with mobile phones. 
• Iqbal Quadir says mobile phones fight poverty 
• Richard Wilkinson on "How economic inequality harms societies."

Week of March 5, 2012

Articles, blogs and papers we've been reading over the past month:

• Obama to appoint Eldar Shafir to financial capability advisory council 
• NYT: Big Data's Grassroots Revolution
• Eye-Witness Accounts of Vikram Akula's Humble Harvard Talk
• First Edition of the Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopm
• Mobile Banking and Financial Inclusion: two perspectives in Slate Magazine
• New credit-risk models for the unbanked, a new report from McKinsey on Society 
• Ignacio Mas: "...what poor people need most is to be connected. With connections come opportunities." 
• A new paper on the science of willpower
• Timothy Ogden on the Poor and the True Costs of Joining Financial Systems
• Microfinance in Bangladesh: It's Not What You Thought says Elisabeth Rhyne 
• Daniel Rozas on "The Economics of Microsavings" and "High yield savings as the lynchpin of deposit-driven microfinance" 
• David Leonhardt's must read on our middle-class entitlement
• Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta argue rich people make better parents in: Stress Impacts Good Parenting 
• The Roodman-Bateman Debate: A CFI Dialogue
• NYT: Your mistaken belief in financial willpower
• What cash transfers tell us about the humanitarian community

Week of December 19, 2011

A long list of things we’ve been reading online over the past month. Let us know if we missed anything important via comments.  Happy holiday reading!

• Tim Besley reviews Poor Economics, More Than Good Intentions, & Portfolios of the Poor in Foreign Affairs 
• "Latest findings from Randomized Evaluations of Microfinance," a new paper from CGAP, FAI, IPA and J-PAL
• David Roodman explains the Pitt & Khandker debate and “The Logging Business” and “Six Distinctions in Mapping the Landscape of Data and Research” in microfinance j.mp/vkrYWP
• M-CRIL's in-depth analysis of Andhra Pradesh crisis
• NYT's Vikas Bajaj on resignation of SKS microfinance 's Vikram Akula
• “SKS to Add Financial Services to Microfinance as Founder Quits” - Business Week
• "Microsave asks clients: How are you coping in AP without MFIs?" Not so well apparently. 
• The Wall Street Journal on “Are India's poorest catching up?” 
• Who should regulate India's microfinance sector?
• “Do we still need a microfinance bill?” asks M.S. Sriram at Livemint.com
• “Lords of Poverty Struggle to Survive” and the demise of microfinance from the Business Standard
• Microsave’s new report: Analysis of Financial Institutions Riding M-PESA Railsand a summary from David Roodman: Immobile Money: M-PESA's Early Struggles as Financial Service Platform
• "Why small is not beautiful when it comes to savings?" from the IFMR Trust
• What Americans can Learn from others: "Global Lessons for Better Savings Habits" 
• Esther Duflo: "Women Empowerment and Economic Development"
• The Economist weighs in on evaluating the MillenniumVillages
• A Kenyan Economist Offers the First Independent and Rigorous Evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project
• Owen Barder and the open data revolution 
• "Nudge thyself--economists have more to learn to claim a realistic model of human behavior" on the Financial Times
• IPA Research Affiliate Eldar Shafir delivers this TED talk examining decision making under conditions of scarcity
• William Easterly in the Guardian: "A firewall should be built between USAid and the defence department"
• Great overview of the development blogging sector in 2011 
•  “Hey girl, international development Ryan Gosling” is not to be missed. HT @aidwatch
• Chris Blattman on “The publication bias problem (and the redemption of Blattman?)” 
• Why development research often gets it wrong: "A little thing called general equilibrium"
• How should economics lecturers respond to the recent Greg Mankiw walk-out?

Week of November 4, 2011

Articles and papers we've been reading from around the web:

• Underbanked market data from Center for Financial Services Innovation & Core Innovation Capital 
• TheAtlantic: $112,000-The true cost of losing your job in the Great Recession
• TheAtlantic: 1 in 15 Americans can be classified at the poorest poor 
• NYT: Unbanked America with interactive map using data from new Pew Report
• David Roodman: How Donors and Investors See Microfinance Now
• Jonathan Morduch on Tom Heinemann and The Micro Debt film 
• Jonathan Morduch: How much does Consumption Smoothing Contribute to the Welfare of Families? 
• Weathering the Storm: Dan Rozas on MFI case studies and making good business decisions in tough times
• The Millennium Villages evaluation debate heats up, boils over and News Millennium Villages Project & Misconceptions about Impact Evaluation (comments well worth reading)
• Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman

Week of October 17, 2011

• Piyush Tantia/ideas42 discusses a new case study: "Turning Interest into Savings"
• "The Millennium Villages Project is working well" Jeff Sachs responds  to criticism in the Poverty Matters blog.
• Conversations on Microfinance: Jonathan Morduch is interviewed by Timothy Ogden on the the current state of microfinance, innovations, opportunities and challenges, the nonprofit/for profit debate, and more.
• A Survey of the Evidence on Over-Indebtednes. New report from CGAP.
• World Bank report on Andhra Pradesh (AP): After the microfinance crisis: Assessing the Role of Govt-led microcredit alternatives
• "Without fresh lending, MFIs will remain in crisis mode" in India and especially in AP 
• David Roodman: "Zap It to Me: First Randomized Trial of Micro-transfers" 
• Who spends what on aid and where? (from Global Dashboard)
• NYT: U.S. to cut foreignaid budget, with devastating consequences both here & abroad 
• NYT's Vikas Bajaj on "frugal innovation" in India: roving tellers use high tech to bank the poor