The Do U Care Edition
1. Migration: If you don't get the "edition" reference, I think I envy you. But I care, and in the absence of other specific ways to oppose cruelty and barbarism, I'll spend some time here sharing some useful information about migration. Such as the fact that the US has become a "low-migration" country. I think this is as significant a change to the nature of the country as the closing of the frontier, especially since so many people don't seem to realize how much migration, whether within the US or to the US from other countries, has dropped.
On to that other crucial fact about migration: it's very very good for the people migrating and doesn't harm the people who are already there. Here's the newly officially published in AER paper by Clemens, Lewis and Postel studying the effect of the end of the Bracero program which led to 1/2 a million Mexican workers leaving the country, without any detectable benefits for native workers (employers simply invested in labor-replacing technology it appears). Here's a new NBER paper on the forced migration of Poles after World War II finding that migrants invested more in human capital for three generations. That's consistent with other work that shows long-term positive, sustained effects for people who move, even those who don't have full choice. Here's a story about how migrants fleeing the US to Canada are finding employment and thriving.
If you're interested in the big picture on global migration, the 2018 OECD International Migration Outlook is out.
2. Banking: I talk a lot about the overlaps between US and global financial inclusion issues--from household finance to consumer protection to business models to regulation. So I think both of these next two items are relevant well-beyond the countries they are focused on.
First, here's New America with a new report on how local and community banks systematically charge people-of-color more for their accounts (here's the OpEd version), which doesn't exactly encourage these historically excluded populations to join the banking mainstream. Oh, and the consumer protection regulatory system is being undermined in more ways than you might realize. Not only is there direct deregulation, but recently the Supreme Court ruled that the way the SEC carries out many of its "trials" for investment fraud are unconstitutional--and the CFPB is too. Here's Arjan Schutte writing about being fired from the CFPB's consumer advisory board which, y'know, at least he's not being unconstitutional now.
On the other hand, in India, the RBI is working to turn urban cooperative banks into "small finance banks." This piece explains a bit about the history of Indian urban cooperative banks and the regulatory issues involved--it's not all good. It's worth reading for anyone thinking about productive ways forward for more inclusive banking systems.
3. Digital Finance: In most of the countries where digital financial services have made inroads among poor households, agents are playing a big role. But those agents are often basically the same folks we see running microenterprises that we can't figure out how to improve. And that probably means that their growth is being limited by the quality of services offered and decisions made by those agents. Here's a paper from Acimovic, Parker, Drake and Balasubramanian who attempt to help mobile money agents in Tanzania (way to go including the country in the paper title guys!) improve their business practices. Specifically not be plagued so much by "stock-outs" that mean they can't serve customers either trying to deposit or withdraw cash ("stock" can be either mobile money or cash depending on the transaction). They find what I would term the "heavy paternalism" approach works best--showing up in person to train and then giving specific direction via text each day. It reminds me a lot of the "mind the change" paper of a few years ago, and the Kenyan enterpreneur mentor paper from last year. Overall it seems that an important dimension for improving microenterprise profitability is inventory management.
Another big piece of the digital financial services equation is designing services that are helpful to the customers you are trying to serve and that they actually want. That's a new report from ProsperityNow focused on low-income US consumers, but you already know that I think such things are globally relevant.
4. Methods etc.: Here's an idea for experiment design: don't substantially and repeatedly mislead people for decades about your experimental design. Forget everything you think you know about the Stanford Prison Experiment, a staple in pop culture and social psychology, because almost everything published about it is an inaccurate representation of what actually happened. Given the horrors happening around us, it's hard to get too riled up about this but it really is stunning reading as a famous researcher repeatedly denies specific accusations until evidence from the archives of the experiment force him to acknowledge what really happened.
On a more positive note, here's a clever little interactive game to explain concepts of "network science" or more simply, how social connections influence perceptions and behavior, or more complicatedly, how to think in a bit more structured way about spillovers from treatments that have an informational component.
And here's David Evans sharing a provocative statement from Karthik Muralidharan at the RISE Conference--paraphrased, when working on a large scale experiments run by governments you might be better off not doing a baseline survey--and various reactions, which lead to a very good discussion.
5. Consumer Behavior/Social Enterprise: So this one makes most sense in light of what is coming after, but bear with me. What happens when you get parents involved in improving teaching practices in Ghanaian preschools? Bad, bad stuff. Well at least counterproductive stuff.
So keep that in mind as we move finally to an interesting experiment on how much influence customers can have on corporate behavior (via Ray Fisman). A key part of the social enterprise movement is the idea that just behavior will resonate with customers and lead to, if not higher sales, than at least loyal customers. But it turns out customers have a hard time remembering who the good and bad actors are when it comes time to make purchases. So while there may be some loyal customers out there, it's going to be hard to get the mass consumer to get on board with shifting corporate behavior via their spending. Which ultimately is a pretty good argument for Just Capital's approach of building an index that socially-conscious consumers of stocks at least can get what they want without having to remember any of the details.
I'm always a sucker for Twitter threads with interesting data, and twists and turns. This one is about the curious case of rising opioid deaths in the US in states that did or did not expand Medicaid.
