Editor's Note: There won't be a FAIV next week. We'll all be on vacation or traveling.
1. LOL Nothing Replicates: Jason Collins looks back over Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow post-repligate, finding some distinctly uncomfortable language ("You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these [priming] studies are true"). Meanwhile a new paper in PNAS suggests that fMRI studies have 70% false positive rates.
2. Migration: There's a lot of work to be done understanding intra-household bargaining in the context of migration. A new paper tries to estimate the returns to internal migration in South Africa by looking at the effects on the migrant as well as on the households from which the migrant departs and which the migrant joins. A southern New Zealand town is trying to recruit internal migrants because it has too many jobs. Perhaps they could expand the Tongan lottery. And the New York Times magazine has a long piece on Canada's refugee sponsorship program where you can find this unexpected but lovely statement: "I can't provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them."
3. The Future of Microfinance: Next Billion has a terrific collection of posts on last year's sale of six microfinance banks by Opportunity International to MyBucks, a for-profit fintech firm. Dan Rozas and Gabriela Garcia provide an overview, Chuck Waterfield expresses skepticism that the transaction is good for customers and Vicki Escarra, Opportunity International Global CEO, responds. Anybody else miss the old days when this type of back and forth was common?
4. Financial Inclusion: Michael King summarizes his new co-edited volume on the state of financial inclusion in Kenya. As ever, the story is more complicated than the headlines about M-PESA and M-Shwari suggest and there is still a great deal of work to be done.
5. Agent Banking and Gender: Some new work from MicroSave looks at looks at how banking agents differentially interact with women in Uttar Pradesh, India. Agents report a preference for serving female customers, but that preference comes from women being more "manageable", less knowledgeable and asking fewer questions.
Turns out that if you ask economists a very narrow yet vague question about a basic income policy, most will reject it. Anyone want to join a faiV experts panel where we promise to ask better (at least better written) questions? Source: IGM Economic Experts Panel
