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Impact through Research
Innovation requires attention to the psychology and broad needs of low-income families to create the next generation of financial solutions.
Details of savings, credit and insurance products can determine their success and failure—sometimes in surprising ways.
Evidence on how financial access affects households. The strengths and limitations of randomized control trials.
Innovation requires understanding tradeoffs in commercialization, price-setting, prudential regulation and efforts to protect the poor.
Featured Research
Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day
Financial diaries research in Bangladesh, India and South Africa intimately examines the financial “portfolios” of poor households and finds that they lead surprisingly sophisticated financial lives.
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The Atlantic - March 2012
The Atlantic provides an overview of the depth and understanding provided by Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day in this article. Reporter Thompson says, "Portfolios of the Poor is not a comprehensive survey of the 40 percent of the world living in $2-a-day poverty. Such a thing isn't possible, and it would be foolish and over-simple to pretend that the lessons of Portfolios lets us know the lives of two billion people. But as these three illustrative examples show, at a time when saving is only slowly coming back into vogue in the United States, some of the poorest families have found ways to save for life, death, and injury in economies that are too poor to provide the kind of wage and medical insurance that is common in the United States and Europe."
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BBC World Service - March 2012
Jonathan Morduch talks to the BBC about the financial strategies employed by some of the two billion people who live on less than $2 a day. He talks about some of the people profiled in "Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on Two Dollars a Day," and the surprising ways they made ends meet.
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U.S. Financial Diaries Website is Live
February 2012
The Financial Access Initiative (FAI), Bankable Frontier Associates (BFA) and The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), will track families in four geographic regions in the U.S. over 16 months and collect highly detailed data on household financial activity. The study promises a timely and independent look at how low-income Americans are managing their financial lives. Visit the website to learn more and join our mailing list to receive project updates and more information about our research findings.
Jonathan Morduch at WWB Microfinance and the Capital Markets Conference
Location: J.P. Morgan
383 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10017
To register visit: http://www.swwb.org/content/events/cmc2011
Date: April 6, 2011
11:15am-12:30pm Social Impact in Microfinance: What is the Research Telling Us?
The microfinance industry and business model are constantly evaluated and challenged by various players,
including governments, multilateral/bilateral agencies, donors, investors, researchers, and the press. Impact
and effectiveness of microfinance are being tested using a wide variety of research techniques, including
randomized controlled trials. This level of scrutiny is unprecedented in the social investments space and is
made possible through the industry’s rigorous research community.
• Is microfinance currently held to a higher standard of scrutiny relative to other social
investments?
• Are research pieces helping or hurting the case of microfinance? How can we use the rich
information from findings to improve the business model and enhance the value proposition for
clients?
• Has the microfinance sector over-promised on its social goals? What is the call to action?
Moderator: Jody Rasch, Moody’s
Speakers: Jonathan Morduch, New York University; Nathanael Goldberg, Innovations for Poverty Action; Sharon Ravitch, University of Pennsylvania;and Ken Liffiton, MSC.
Blog
May 15, 2012
Commentary
Right Place, Right Time: The importance of workplace in financial action
May 8, 2012
Commentary
What’s wrong and what’s right about consumer finance?
 It’s the microfinance bête noire. The great unspeakable. The furtive shadow slinking down the narrow alleys of poverty. Yes, the consumer loan. Has microfinance really come to this, we ask? Helping the poor buy a TV? Charging 40% interest for the couch to go in fro
May 2, 2012
Formality and Informality: Lessons from the new Findex Survey
May 1, 2012
Commentary
More Mysteries of Savings
 A lot of progress has been made in understanding the savings behavior of poor households over the last few years. A raft of new studies are beginning to appear that promise to advance our understanding further.
April 25, 2012
Microinsurance: A Review of the Literature
In most of the developing world, the poor are disproportionately vulnerable to risk. Whether these risks come in the form of the death of a family member, severe illness, the loss of an asset such as livestock, or a natural disaster, these events have a particularly debilitating affect on the poor who are less able to financially absorb and recover from such shocks.
April 5, 2012
Commentary
What should regulators do?
 There’s not enough academic research on the regulation of financial inclusion. Many of the questions might seem too applied for some researchminded economists, but that leaves regulators with few guideposts.
March 29, 2012
Commentary
Can increasing access enhance or jeopardize the stability of financial systems?
Regulators hope that expanding financial access will also provide greater stability to the overall financial system. This would occur as the market becomes larger and more diverse, and thus better able to withstand difficulties in any particular corner. The range of depositors would enlarge, as would the kinds of financial institutions in the market. Greater competition among providers would create pressure for quality competition.
March 27, 2012
Commentary
Can the expansion of microfinance add up to macro impacts?
The most basic question is the micro one: whether microfinance typically yields notable impacts on the lives of low-income families. The logical follow-on is, to the extent that micro impacts emerge, how do those impacts
March 16, 2012
Links We Like
A sampling of what we've been reading this week from around the web:
Background
The Financial Access Initiative (FAI) is a research center based at NYU Wagner focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals
Financial access holds the promise to help low-income individuals in developing countries manage their economic lives and build wealth. The Initiative aims to provide rigorous research on the impacts of financial access and on innovative ways to improve access.
The Initiative was launched with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and American International Group, Inc. to the NYU Wagner Graduate School. Research by FAI researchers is also supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The World Bank, CGAP, and other organizations.
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