Week of July 19, 2019

1. The Great Convergence: I want to tell you about a young man in his early 20s. I'll call him M. He has a high school diploma, but it's from a school system where students don't tend to learn very much in the upper grades. M has a semi-skilled job, but it's tenuous and the hours are pretty unpredictable. Public transport in his neighborhood is poor, so he borrowed some money to get a "minimum viable vehicle" in order to get the job. His connection to the formal banking system is negligible. His biggest goal is to save up some money for a better apartment--where he lives now is as safe and reliable as his vehicle, which is to say, not very. He's been saving up for that for awhile, but he keeps his savings with his grandmother. The combination of ups and downs and needs from his extended family has kept that savings from growing much, if at all.
Based on that description, there is no way to tell if M is Manuel from Puebla, Melokuhle from Cape Town, Mohammed from Dhaka, Mentari from Jakarta or Michael from Baltimore. There has been tremendous progress in reducing poverty(and yes in financial inclusion) in most of the world over the last few decades. Meanwhile, in the US, there has been tremendous growth in inequality. More than that, the US economy and the labor market in particular has become much more like that in developing countries. The result is a great convergence: For the bottom 40% of the income distribution in the US, the economic reality they live in is more like that of Mexico, South Africa or Indonesia than the economic reality for the upper part of the income distribution.

2. The State of the US and the World: From a financial inclusion standpoint, there are fewer and fewer meaningful differences in the challenges faced by middle income countries and the US, at least if we care about that bottom 40% of the income distribution. Below is a chart I quickly made based on the latest Findex data, which helpfully breaks out the US lower 40%, comparing it to middle income countries.

Just taking it at face value, you can see that the differences on a variety of financial inclusion metrics aren't that big. Take a close look particularly at the "No source of emergency funds" metric. Yes, the US has more people with no source of emergency funds than middle income countries on average. The one metric that stands out is the use of formal credit, but that difference is almost certainly due to credit cards. As digital credit grows rapidly in the countries where mobile money systems are functional, expect that gap to close dramatically.
The financial inclusion challenge for many middle income countries is rapidly shifting from one of expanding access to formal services broadly to issues of consumer protection for the masses, ensuring that services offered are appropriate and safe, and of reaching the last mile. Sound familiar?

3. The Corrupted Economy: But there's another part of this story that is less about financial inclusion or exclusion defined narrowly, and more about how the economy functions and what that means for growth, development, opportunity, mobility and even social cohesion.
When we think about the challenges of growth and development in middle income countries the conversation is often about institutions, about access to good jobs, about quality of education, about opportunity and economic mobility for the average citizen. The general understanding is that in these countries there is one set of rules and opportunities for those who are already wealthy, those connected to power (economic and political), and everyone else. Getting a place at a university, getting a government job, getting a formal job at an international, making a powerful friend are like winning lottery tickets that can transport someone from one class to another--but they are allocated like winning lottery tickets. Getting one is a factor of luck and divine intervention. For most everyone not already part of the elite, there is little prospect of upward mobility absent a lottery ticket. Even if you follow the rules, there's little reason to believe the institutions or the powerful are going to follow the rules.

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Week of July 12, 2019

1. Research, Evidence, Policy and Politicians: We talk a lot around here about evidence-based policy and often about the political economy of adopting evidence-based policies. In the last faiV I featured some of the first evidence that elected officials (in this case 2000+ Brazilian mayors) are interested in evidence and will adopt policies when they are shown evidence that they work.
Far be it from me to let such encouraging news linger too long. Here's a new study on American legislators (oddly also 2000+ of them) that finds that 89% of them were uninterested in learning more about their constituents opinions even after extensive encouragement, and of those that did access the information, the legislators didn't update their beliefs about constituent opinions. Here's the NY Times Op-Ed by the study authors.
But wait, there's more! In another newly published study using Twitter data on American congresspeople, Barera et al. find that politicians follow rather than lead interest in public issues. But also that politicians are more responsive to their supporters than to general interest. Which perhaps goes some way to explaining the seeming contradictions between these two studies: American legislators are not interested in accurate data on all of their constituents' opinions, but will follow the opinions of their most vocal supporters.

2. Research Reliability: Two studies of the same population finding at least nominally opposing things published in the same week is kind of unusual, shining a brighter light on the question of research reliability than there normally is. But there have been plenty of other recent instances of the reliability of research being called into question for lots of different reasons:
* The difference between self-reported income and administrative data: the widely known finding that Americans living in extreme poverty (below $2 a day) was based on self-reported income. Re-running that analysis with administrative data that presumably does a better job of capturing access to benefits and other sources of income and wealth finds that only .11 percent of the population actually has incomes this low, and most are childless adults. Here's a Vox write-up of the findings and issues.
* A "pop" book on marriage from an academic claimed that most married women were secretly desperately unhappy. But that's because he misunderstood the survey data, believing that the code "spouse not present" meant that the husband was not in the room when the question was answered, when it really means that the spouse has moved out. Again, Vox does some good work explicating the specifics and the context: most books aren't meaningfully peer reviewed.
* But you probably should be very skeptical of any research on happiness regardless of whether it's peer reviewed because "the necessary conditions for...identification..are unlikely to ever be satisfied."
* And you should be skeptical of many papers studying the persistence of economic phenomena over time, and spatial regressions in general because of the possibility of inflated significance that is really just noise.
* You should also perhaps be skeptical of any claims based on Big 5 personality traits outside of WEIRD countries because the results are not stable across time or interviewers.
* And there are still a lot of issues with the applications of statistical techniques across the social sciences, including, for instance, the misapplication and misinterpretation of RDD designs, or conditioning on post-treatment variables (that's a paper from last year that finds 40% of experiments published in top 6 Political Science journals show evidence of doing so), or using estimated effect sizes to do ex post power calculations.
* Or this Twitter thread about a series of papers published in top medical journals that defies description, other than you really have to read it.
It's enough to make you despair.

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Week of June 21, 2019

1. Concentration Camps: The United States is operating concentration campsagain, and one soon will be at the site of one of the Japanese-American camps operated in the 1940s. The conditions are inhumane and unconscionable, both for children and for adults,and getting worse. People are dying. Babies are being denied medical care. Last week, I joked about a scream of helpless rage about financial literacy programs. This week, I'm not joking, and I don't know what else to do, except to do my best to not look away.

2. Philanthropy and Social Investment (and Microfinance): What would it look like if US philanthropy en masse decided the reappearance of concentration camps in the United States was a crisis that deserved all hands and funds on deck? I don't know, but I don't think historians would view that decision unkindly.
There is something going on in American philanthropy--for the first time since 1986, charitable giving did not track GDP, falling 1.7% last year. More specifically, giving by individuals fell 3.4% and for the first time (since the data has been tracked) made up less than 70% of total contributions. Here's the researchers' analysis of the new data. And here's Ben Soskis' Twitter thread on the important questions the decline in giving raises about giving culture and inequality. Several years ago I speculated about whether Giving Tuesday's hidden theory of change was to shore up American giving culture, and that question has new relevance.
On the social investment front, there's a new book out that I can recommend, A Research Agenda for Financial Inclusion and Microfinance. If you're wondering about the connection to social investment, Jonathan and I have the opening chapter, "The Challenge of Social Investment Through the Lens of Microfinance." Keeping on that theme, Beisland, Ndaki and Mersland have a new paper on agency costs for non-profit and for-profit microfinance firms, finding that CEO power determines whether residual losses are higher or lower in non-profit firms. Governance matters in social investment!
If you're one of those CEOs (or just any aspiring social entrepreneur), you may be interested in Alex Counts', founder of the Grameen Foundation, new book, Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind. Here's an interview with Alex about the book and the evolution of microfinance (which I'm including even though he says a couple of nice things about me).

3. Digital Finance, Part I: Libra: The news of digital finance this week was dominated by the announcement of Libra, Facebook's proposed...well, depending on what you read, either Facebook's "me too" derivative payments service masquerading as crypto, or Facebook's attempt to take over the world and replace all governments. Here's Vox's explainer.
My favorite immediate response was from Erik Hinton, which I have to quote in full: "God, grant me the confidence of Facebook, a company that has managed to lose most of the data that it's either stolen or extorted and has repeatedly been caught lying or miscounting its own analytics, deciding to create a global financial system."
As that response hints, there are a lot of questions. Here's a start at some of them and some answers about who is participating and why. Here are Tyler Cowen's questions about how exactly Libra will work as a currency without an underpinning banking and regulatory system. Here's a view that Facebook's main target in the near-term is remittances, but that it really does have ambitions to replace national currencies. One of the things I find most interesting about the whole thing is that this is a like Facebook building a giant sign to the world's governments saying: "Come seize all our data and regulate us heavily!" (and governments are indeed reading the sign!) I would guess that there will be approximately .1 seconds between the first cross-border transfer and an accusation of money laundering or terrorist financing. I was having a conversation this week about the main reason Amazon hasn't started consumer lending: it would never do something to invite regulator access to its data.
Here's a piece on the good and bad of Libra which I highlight because it's an odd mix of complete ignorance about how money works and evolved (did you know that before bitcoin there had never been money that wasn't controlled by a government?), with some actual engagement on the dangers of private digital monetary systems.

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Week of June 14, 2019

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.

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Week of May 24, 2019

1. India: This year I resolved to make sure I was paying more attention to events in countries with large populations that aren't the United States, and not just treating them like an instance of a broader class. Given the elections in India, and the somewhat surprising strength of the BJP's performance, this seems like an opportune moment. Here's a Vox explainer on the elections for those of you who, like me, may have been only vaguely aware of the elections as a referendum on Modi vs. (Rahul) Gandhi. Here's an interesting essay on the most important feature of Indian politics not being the rivalry between parties but the generally uncontested move toward closing off civil liberties and a more authoritarian state. Here's 12 reasons why the BJP won, with perhaps the most interesting point being the BJP's efficiency at actually delivering welfare programs rather than just vague promises about future welfare programs. For those of you following along in the US or Australia, or any other country where right-wing populism has experienced a rebirth, there are clear parallels throughout. Here's Shamika Ravi on policy priorities for the new government (written before the election).
There is more than the election going on. So here's a couple of things that may be more of traditional interest to faiV readers. Demonetization was three years ago. Andeverything is back to where it was--maybe this should make programs with "null effects" feel better. And here's a fascinating study of the social lives of married women in Uttarakhand, with a particular emphasis on how "empowerment shocks" spread through social networks and decay over time.

2. Causality and Publishing Redux: A few things popped up related to last week's focus on causality. One point I touched on was spillovers and general equilibrium effects. Here's a note from Paddy Carter of CDC on the tension for DFIs attempting to invest in ways that are "transformative" (read, lots of spillover effects) and measuring their causal impact. I also noted JDE now accepting papers based on per-analysis plans. Pre-registration isn't going so well in psychology where a new study looked at 27 preregistered plans and the ultimate papers and found all of them deviated from the plan, and only one of those noted the change. Brian Nosek's money quote: "preregistration is a skill and not a bureaucratic process." Which could serve as a theme of Berk Ozler's discussion of using pre-registration to boost the credibility of results, not just for an experiment. Very useful for those interested in developing the pre-registration skill.
This may be stretching it a bit, but Raj Chetty's incipient attempt to replace Ec10 at Harvard got a lot of attention this week. There's a lot to recommend his approach, but there are plenty of people who are concerned about the apparent glossing over of causality. I'm honestly worried that some of these things may cause Angus Deaton and other critics of causal claims from RCTs to go into apoplectic fits. Just when you thought some of the messages might be getting through, along comes a new toy. So I should probably not mention that there's an update to the oldDonohue and Levitt paper on abortion and crime that claims it has better evidencewithout dealing with any of the problems in the underlying model.

3. Micro-Digital Finance: Microfinance can be pretty confusing when you get beyond the simple statements and start to worry about how it actually all works, and how it's changing, and what we do and don't know. Hudon, Labie and Szafarz have a nice little primer on those issues with a microfinance alphabet. I wish I had thought of doing this.
I complained last week about "mobile money" not including payment cards, which dominate the United States. But a telecom-driven mobile money product is now available in the US. Well sort of. Not sure what to make of this yet.
Caribou Digital and Mastercard Foundation have a new study of Kenyan microentrepreneurs "platform practices." I also don't know what to make of this, but that's probably because I haven't read it yet, but I figured many of you would be interested.
Among other things it's hard to know what to make of, there's Earnin, a sort-of payday lender, health care cost negotiator, fintech something. It's confusing. And New York State regulators are confused too, which is probably not a good sign for Earnin. But that's nothing new--I have to point again to City of Debtors, a book that documents New York city and state regulators confusion over how to regulate small dollar lending for more than a century.

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Week of May 17, 2019

1. Causality: In this great book I know, Jonathan Morduch describes an obsession over causality as "the marker of the tribe" of economists. Most people outside the field, then, might be surprised to find out how unsettled the science of causality is and how much, after all these years, the practice of academic economics is 80% arguing about causal inference. Well, at least in the circles of applied micro that I run in. Recently Emi Nakamura, an "empirical macroeconomist", won the Clark Medal("American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge") for her work mapping macro theory to macro reality. One of her more well-known papers is a discussion of the gap between theory and evidence in macro; it has a jaw-dropping section on the best existing "evidence" on the effects of monetary policy. So much for an obsession over causal identification.
Now before getting too holier-than-thou over what is considered evidence in macroeconomics, it's worth pointing out that the experimental micro-crowd is just getting around to measuring general equilibrium effects, the defining feature of macro debates. I've linked multiple times to recent work on GE effects of microcredit (and related programs) on labor markets (See here for links and lots of discussion on that). While I was writing about that the other day, it occurred to me to wonder, given what we know about peer effects in education, whether anyone had looked at whether spillovers/GE effects were responsible for the rapid fade-out of early childhood education interventions. Less than 24 hours later, this new paper from List, Momeni and Zenou showed up in my Twitter feed, finding large spillover effects from an early childhood intervention (1.2 SD! on non-cognitive skills, which are increasingly found to be the more important feature of such programs), which lead to substantial underestimation of program impact. On a related note, here's a short video of Paul Niehaus talking about the value of experiments at scale, including better measurement of GE effects.
Still, there are lots of appealing things about using experiments to establish causality, even if it is somewhat akin to looking for the keys under the streetlights. For instance street lights cause a 36% reduction in nighttime outdoor crime in New York City housing developments. Unfortunately, people really don't like the idea of being experimented on, or even the idea of other people being part of an experiment even when the treatment arms are "unobjectionable." (MR summary here). I'm not really sure how to think about that.
If you want to dig deep into causality discussions, Cyrus Samii's syllabus for hisQuant II class this spring is here. Lots (and lots) of interesting and useful links there. If you're more of the video type, Nick Huntington-Klein has a new series of videos on causal inference, including one on causal diagrams and using Daggity to draw them. If you are among the obsessed and want to be even more so, Macartan Humphreys is looking for a post-doc to work with him on causal inference at WZB Berlin.

2. Academic Publishing: To understand the RCT movement you have to know something about one of the world's least efficient markets: economics journals (Yes, I'm sure someone has a paper/post explaining how the market is actually efficient after all). Seema Jayachandran tweeted this week about stats from her first year as co-editor at AEA: Applied: "4% were R&R, 36% were reject w/ reports, 60% were desk rejects." All of her R&Rs were eventually accepted and average and median time to decision was less than 2 months.
Data on the acceptance rates at all the AEA journals shows that Seema is doing an exceptional job. AEJ: Micro received 415 papers over a 12 month period, made decisions on only 55% of them, which were all rejections. Yes, zero of those 415 papers were accepted. The overall data led to this thread from Jake Vigdor with the provocative question: "If a journal...never accepts a manuscript, does it exist?" Or how about this paper from Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett that was finally published in REStat after a decade in R&R? For the record, I have a paper with Michael that we got back for R&R after 4 years that I'm supposed to be revising but I'm writing the faiV instead. While I'm grinding an axe, let me also boost this question from Justin Sandefur on why citations still exist and haven't been replaced by hyperlinks. I wonder if an estimation of the dead weight loss from searching for, formatting and copyediting citation details could get published in an economics journal?
One of the reasons for the dismal acceptance rates in journals is the same as the dismal acceptance rates at top ranked universities. Reputation matters a lot. Tatyana Deryugina has a (revised) proposal on a different way of ranking journals that could lead to a more efficient publishing market. It's a start.
And to close out with some positive news: JDE is now prospectively accepting papers based on pre-analysis plans, without requiring the authors to commit to publishing there. It's almost as if the editors aren't maximizing their oligopolistic power. I hope they don't have their economist credentials revoked.

3. Digital Finance/Bangladesh: When the subject turns to mobile money, the country under discussion is still almost always Kenya even 12 years after the founding of m-Pesa. I have a particular axe to grind about counting use of mobile money without including payment cards, but there is now another reason to look beyond Kenya. There are now more people in Bangladesh with mobile money accounts than in Kenya. Of course, that's a function of population--penetration in Kenya is 73% (axe grinding: 70% of Americans have a credit card; this discussion does not include China), while it's just over 20% in Bangladesh. But we should expect adoption to accelerate in Bangladesh, and Kenya to be left well in the dust in terms of accounts.

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Week of May 10, 2019

1. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week: This week, people around the United States give gifts to show appreciation for teachers. One gift that teachers really like is a decent salary. Way back in the late 1970s, U.S. teachers were paid about 5 percent less than other workers with comparable education and skills. But hey, what’s 5 percent? Did you become a teacher to get rich? Hopefully not, since the U.S. teacher penalty is now nearly 20 percent. (Incidentally, evidence from teachers in Rwanda and health workers in Zambia suggests that recruiting career-focused or salary-focused providers delivers at least as good outcomes hiring people with a focus on pro-social motivation. So even if you did go into it to “get rich,” students and patients will be okay.) In Latin America, teachers faced a gap but it was narrowing in the early 2000s. In Africa, primary teachers face a pay gap but not secondary teachers. In the U.S., teachers have been striking at high levels in the last year, in part over salary, and I recently wrote a piece on what the U.S. can learn from international research on raising teacher salaries. In most cases, raising salaries doesn’t increase effort of teachers currently on the job, but it does matter for attracting and retaining good teachers. (Salary increases can also be a good opportunity to introduce other reforms.) De Ree and others make the argument that because the returns to salary increases take place relatively far in the future, it’s unlikely to be a cost effective education investment relative to immediate quality improvements. That said, the high-income countries with the best education results are those that pay their teachers well.

2. First, Do No Harm (in schools): The primary objective of a formal education is arguably to learn things. At least, that’s what the World Bank argues; I realize the statement is not without controversy. But the first priority – if we can separate that from the primary objective – may be to keep children safe. Salisbury has a recent essay on the dual dangers of risky school buildings and violence perpetrated by school workers in low- and middle-income environments. This has been in the news recently with the collapse of a nursery and primary school n Lagos, Nigeria, and the revelation that a staff member at a charity running schools to help vulnerable girls in Liberia was in fact raping girls [Or, you know, the US's refusal to do anything to protect children from being murdered in their schools, so that children have to sacrifice their lives to save their peers--TO]. But it’s not just the news. A recent survey of children in Liberian primary schools shows that one in four children admit to having had sex with a teacher (and more with any member of staff), and in Kerala, India, more than one in five adolescents reported sexual abuse in the last year. Three-quarters reported physical abuse. I’m reminded of this horrifying line inJennifer Makumbi’s masterful novel Kintu, when a primary school girl in Uganda is raped by her math teacher: She “bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care.” It’s hard to imagine children learning and thriving in school under threat of violence.

3. Get the Lights On: By the latest estimates, more than half of people in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to electricity. Last week, Arlet, Ereshchenko, & Rocha highlighted that this is not a village problem: one quarter of the unelectrified are in urban areas. Part of the problem is the irregularity of the available power: regular power outages – common in many countries – deter households from connecting to the power grid. Another factor is how complicated it is to connect to the grid, which is unsurprising: If we want people to do things that they probably want to do anyway (like connecting to the grid), then make it easy for them. Yesterday the World Bank launched a big report on energy in Africa, which showed that in some places, people don’t get electricity even if they live within access to an electrical grid. Connection costs are high and – in addition to the consistency problem above – “electricity connection via conventional AC (alternating current) supply requires minimum building standards that many existing houses do not meet.”

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Week of May 2, 2019

1. Microfinance/Household Finance: I mentioned the Hrishipara Financial Diaries last week--it's a project Stuart Rutherford has been running in central Bangladesh for four years now. That's a truly unique data set of high frequency data on the financial lives of households. I also mentioned that Stuart is now funding the continuation of the diaries out of his own pocket. Don't make me beg for someone to step in with more funding so this dataset gets even more valuable. It's incredibly cheap by the way---hmm, maybe the first faiV GoFundMe? See, don't make me resort to such things!
Continuing in the wave of revisiting ideas about microfinance and it's impact, Bruce Wydick has "3 reasons the impact of microcredit might be bigger than we thought." Of course, the "we" in that sentence matters a lot. Mushfiq Mubarak and Vikas Dimble have a short review of microfinance research with handy links to the research we talk about most these days: evidence for ways that microfinance could innovate to increase impact. Of course, I have to return to the binding constraint on microfinance innovation: funding appropriate for investment in innovation.

2. Replication: I know what you're thinking: "Hey, I haven't heard about Worm Wars in a long time. What happened?" And so, let me bring you a new paper from Owen Ozier that reviews the history of the Worm Wars in an effort to understand the state of reproducibility in Economics and related topics. Here is Owen's Twitter thread with some "wild things" he learned working on the paper. And here's Annette Brown's replies (one, two, three) pointing out some longstanding errors in the literature on replication in economics--one lesson is that if you don't read the variable definitions you're likely to draw the wrong conclusions and others won't be able to replicate your work.
Here is an interesting argument that theory constrains degrees of researcher freedom more than experiment--that in fact one of the sources of the replication crisis is a lack of theoretical frameworks around empirical research. Oh, and that empirical work needs more formal mathematical models. In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is coming from the perspective of "behavioral sciences" which apparently does not include economics, where alot of recent argument has been about the need for experiments to constrain degrees of freedom and that "mathiness" is a problem. And here's Dorothy Bishop on "reining in the four horsemen of irreproducibility".
Inherent variability is not one of those four horsemen, but it is a plausible source of irreproducibility that has nothing to do with bad practices or researcher misbehavior. If reactions to stimuli vary a lot based on minor contextual factors (which is in fact one of the findings of behavioral sciences, albeit one that is itself subject to lots of questions about replication), then you should expect that the exact same experiment conducted at a different time and place with different subjects will yield different results. Whether that's the case is the subject of this debate between Simmons/Simonsohn, McShane/Bockenholt/Hansen (not that one), and Judd and Kenney (also not that one), all hosted by Andrew Gelman. It's worth the time to read through.

3. Research and Communications: Taking that conversation as a leaping off point, here's a new paper on demand effects in survey experiments. On the one hand, it may come as a relief to know that the paper doesn't find much evidence of experimenter demand effects. On the other hand, a lot of economics lab experiments are built on the idea that the experimenter can induce people to behave in certain ways with incentives--and when those incentives don't work, it's evidence of some other important factor operating. But, "Even financial incentives to respond in line with researcher expectations fail to consistently induce demand effects." I feel like this paper could not have been published in an economics journal, because the theory constraints (I'm particularly proud of this callback).

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Week of April 26, 2019

1. Household Finance: I'm as surprised as anyone that this piece I wrote on the waste of time and money that is mandatory financial literacy classes in the Washington Post seems to be getting as much traction as it is. It's the closest I've ever come to going viral on Twitter (if you want to, here's the tweet just ready and waiting for you to retweet and further drive up those numbers). The comments, by the way, are about what you would expect--and further evidence for Morgan Housel's "you have to live it to believe it" thesis on perspectives of finance. I'm not the only one banging the drum against financial literacy classes: here's Jen Tescher of CFSI imploring banks to stop funding finlit classes and focus on tools that actually help customers.
One of the likely reasons (but certainly not the only one!) that finlit makes such little difference is the mismatch between what is taught and the actual financial lives of most households. Take for instance figuring out income taxes in the new economy. Most people in the US got a tax cut in 2018 but most of those think their taxes actually went up, because the connection between taxes and paychecks is so damned complicated in the US. And trying to figure it out if you're a contractor rather than an employee...
There is something worse than legislators mandating financial literacy. Intuit engaged in shockingly (even for cynical me) deceptive behavior by tricking people into using their paid product rather than the free product that they were eligible for--even going so far as to make sure that search engines didn't index the web page to use their regulatorily mandated free file service so it was for all intents and purposes invisible. No amount of financial literacy is going to fix that. If you were thinking that this sort of behavior was exactly why the CFPB was created you would be right, but since Mick Mulvaney has destroyed the agency, don't expect any meaningful action against Intuit.
This isn't just a US problem. This sort of thing--hiding the information customers need to make good financial decisions--happens everywhere. Think of the changes in transparency of pricing of M-Pesa. Or this audit study by Xavi Gine and Rafe Mazer finding bank personnel in Ghana, Mexico and Peru don't tell customers about the best account for them (the customers that is). This seems like the right time to bang on one of my pet drums: middle-income countries, look to the US to the see the future of your financial system and tremble.
Looking from the other side, the US has a lot to learn from international contexts about how households manage volatile financial lives. Stuart Rutherford has a fantastic write-up of the 3 years of ups-and-downs and coping strategies of a family in the Hrishapara Financial Diaries. Stop what you're doing and read it. But let me also call-out that Stuart is now funding the Hrishipara diaries out of his own pocket. Any funder who is reading this: send Stuart some money to keep up this remarkable work. Please.
My friends at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program have a new report on short-term financial stability and how important it is for any larger goals, based on the work of a number of organizations focused on the issue (NB: I'm a senior fellow of Aspen FSP and was involved in the early discussions that led to this report). Before you international folks keep scrolling...there is a lot of overlap between the insights here and the situation in middle-income and developing countries. And you could easily frame it in the same way that most on the international scene do: the importance of building resilience to shocks.

2. Financial Inclusion: I'm one of the retrogrades who refuses to give up on the term "financial inclusion" (while acknowledging the points made by advocates of "financial security" and "financial health"). Speaking of retrogrades, Matthew Soursourian at CGAP is even more retrograde than I am, making an argument that "access" is important and we shouldn't fetishize "usage." One of the reasons is that usage may be harmful--and Greta Bull argues that we need to talk about that, particularly around credit. Over at Next Billion, Graham Wright of MSC (formerly MicroSave--apparently I'm also retrograde in not changing FAI's name), has some speculation on the next 20 years in financial inclusion (which I take as explicit endorsement for "inclusion" whether Graham meant it or not). One of his key points is on the issue of consumer protection, which in addition to dovetailing with Greta's post, allows me to point out that in every other domain the word "inclusion" means fair and equitable participation and so we should make that part of the defacto definition of financial inclusion. Drawing things fully back to Matthew's post, the one thing I think he misses in the argument for access is network effects. The value of an account has a lot to do with who else has and uses accounts and we should expect usage to trail substantially behind access especially when less than, say, 60% of people have accounts.
Two quick hits on China and financial inclusion: Here's a piece that argues that China's "social credit score" is less coherent and more complex than it is usually portrayed. But then at the Avengers:End Game premiere, one of the trailers was a public shaming of delinquent debtors. I don't know if that's confirmatory or contradictory evidence.
Finally, there is a lot to learn from the history of financial systems and the way they include and exclude. Rebecca Spang reviews a new book (The Promise and Peril of Credit--which would have been a great title for Greta's post--by Francesca Trivellato) about the development of financial instruments in Europe and anti- and philo-semitism and how it shaped economies.

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Week of April 12, 2019

1. Arbitrary and Biased: I feel like "arbitrary and biased" should have been the tagline for the faiV but it'll have to do as just the name this week's edition (I won't make the obvious joke). The reference here specifically is an update to my post at CGAP on impact evaluations and systematic reviews of financial inclusion interventions. Duvendack and Mader, authors of a systematic review of reviews that I've mentioned in the faiV and in that post, responded. And then I responded to them. The short version, if you don't want to click on all those links or do a lot of scrolling, is that we disagree substantially (though in good faith!) and particularly on the issues of arbitrariness and bias. My perspective on these issues have been substantially influenced by Deaton's and Pritchett's critiques of RCTs, which feels a bit ironic. Systematic reviews are useful, but they are no less arbitrary nor less biased than other attempts to synthesize the literature--they're just arbitrary and biased in different ways, albeit generally more transparent ways (though what we know about how disclosure affects people's trust leaves a question about the benefits of that disclosure).
Reveling in the arbitrarily biased essential nature of the research enterprise, here are a couple of papers that raise different questions about how the literature on microcredit may be biased. Bedecarrats, Guerin, Morvant-Roux and Roubaudreplicate the Al-Amana microcredit impact study and find errors and issues with the data and code--though exactly how much it matters to the big picture conclusion isn't clear. Meanwhile Dahal and Fiala review the microcredit RCTs focusing on whether they have sufficient power to detect likely magnitude of effects (and find that they aren't) and find significant and meaningful effects on profits when the data is pooled. I need to read both these papers more closely, but they are interesting enough that I didn't want to wait before including them in the faiV.

2. Evidence-Based Policy/Methods: Speaking of arbitrarily biased research, the 5% statistical significance threshold is perhaps the most influential arbitrarily biased feature of modern academic research. Some people are trying to change that--well more than 800 who signed onto a letter in Nature protesting the cutoff. Before you come to a conclusion on whether that letter will make a difference, I must note, as many on Twitter did, that it's not a statistically significant portion of scientists who have signed on.
Another arbitrary bias, according to Nick Lea, deputy chief economist at DfID, is the need to run regressions in economics papers. David Evans, now ensconced at CGD, responds with a defense of regressions and some ideas on how development economics can be better.
Here's a reminder that "purely evidence-based policy doesn't exist" though I'm not sure how many people thought it did. And here's a reminder from Straight Talk on Evidence that short-term impact often fades out, something evidence-based policy really needs to take into account.
And finally, here's an interesting piece from mathemetician Aubrey Clayton adjudicating a long-running dispute between Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb over probabilities, finding that Taleb "overplays his hand."

3. Household Finance: The mythology of Spanish colonialism in the Americas centered heavily on cities of gold (anybody remember this?). Here's a story about the reverse--Dominicans searching Spain (and Switzerland) for lost troves of gold. It's all a scam of course, of the sort immediately recognizable by anyone who has spent time in Latin America. It's a fascinating read because of how the story delves into the psychology that has led so many Dominicans to believe (and continue to believe) an ancestor secreted billions of dollars of gold in Spanish and Swiss banks that they stood to inherit--to the point that they quit jobs and made all sorts of other bad financial decisions. When there is little hope, believing that slow, steady abstemious frugality will matter may seem as much magical thinking as hidden inheritances. Here's a piece from Morgan Housel on how much our (macro)financial experiences affect our later decision making.

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