A Very Rouse-ing Edition
Editor's Note: As mentioned in the last faiV, I'm taking some time away from weekly newsletter writing to work on some other writing projects. This week's edition is guest-edited by Rebecca Rouse, director of IPA's Financial Inclusion Program, which partners with researchers, FSPs and governments to design and test financial products and consumer protection policies.--Tim Ogden
1. Women's Empowerment: Our friends at JPAL released their long-anticipated Practical Guide to Measuring Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Impact Evaluations. It comes with a set of questionnaires and examples of non-survey tools that can be more effective at capturing the useful and reliable data. This new study from the U.S. Census Bureau is timely, showing that when a woman earns more than her husband they both tend to exaggerate the husband’s earnings and diminish the wife’s on their Census responses. Gender norms still shape survey responses, no matter where you are. Seems like a good time to revisit IPA’s discussions on mixed methods approaches to women’s empowerment measurement with Nicola Jones and with Sarah Baird from last year. Finally, the US House passed the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018 this week. The bill seeks to improve USAID’s work on women’s access to finance, and is notable first because of its attention to some (not all) non-financial gender-norms constraints that impact women’s prosperity, and also because it calls for improvements to outcome measurement methods.
2. Migration: The first ever Global Compact for Migration was approved by all 193 member states of the UN last week except for the United States (Hungary is now saying it won’t sign the final document), and one of its 23 high-level objectives is to “promote faster, safer and cheaper transfer of remittances and foster financial inclusion of migrants.” A lot of the language in here sounds like the same old story on remittances, and I am skeptical of the laser-sharp focus on reducing prices (it calls to eliminate remittance corridors with costs higher than 5% by 2030), promoting financial education, and investing in consumer product comparison tools that aren’t based on evidence. Dean Yang’s 2016 study on financial education for Filipino migrants failed to find any positive impact on financial product take-up or usage, for example.
3. Remittances: What about looking to the behavioral econ world to enhance the positive effects of remittances? Behavioral nudges that can leverage digital finance look promising – Harvard Business Review had a nice piece last month on Blumenstock, Callen, and Ghani’s test of mobile money defaults to save in Afghanistan. This experiment is exciting because it shows that, with the right tools, successful interventions from the developed world, like Thaler and Benartzi’s Save More Tomorrow, can achieve similar results in other contexts. Linking remittance transfers to digital finance in the receiving country can create additional opportunities to enhance impact beyond savings, for example using data for credit scoring. Here’s an op-ed from Rafe Mazer and FSD Africa on the opportunities and risks surrounding data sharing models in emerging markets.
4. Nudges: Abraham, Filiz-Ozbay, Ozbay, and Turner have a new working paper on the impact of income-based student loan repayment plans on employment decisions in the United States. They find that limiting the repayment plan options that borrowers are offered can lead them to pursue riskier careers and thereby raise their expected incomes in the long run. By only offering income-based repayment plans, which protects them from defaults by linking payment amounts to earned income, students were unburdened from fears of regret and of making the wrong choice. And lastly, Bernheim and Taubinsky summarize the use of behavioral economics in public policy, including an entire section on policies that target personal saving.
5. Mobile Money: Finally, from Kenya, some experimental evidence on the impact of mobile money on school enrollment in a new working paper by Billy Jack and James Habyarimana at Georgetown. Parents who received a mobile money savings wallet via M-PESA, regardless of whether it incorporated a commitment mechanism or not, increased savings by three to four times, and were 5-6 percentage points more likely to enroll their children in high school. It’s interesting that the commitment savings option wasn’t more or less impactful than just the offer of any mobile wallet, and you can read a new interview with the authors discussing the results on the IPA blog.
Thanks for the chance to take over the faiV this week! - Rebecca
From a new report by the Urban Institute: “By 2020, the federal government is projected to spend more on interest payments on the debt than on children." Source: Urban Institute
