1. MicroDigitalFinance: Back before the holidays, I hosted the first faiVLive on how to think about microcredit impact based on recent evidence. If you missed it, you can watch it here (and people are still watching it, I'm happy to say). Here's Bruce Wydick's take on the proceedings if you prefer text to video.
Last week, there was some discussion of evidence gaps, and it's clear that I'm not the only one thinking in this direction. On the heels of that Campbell Collaborative review-of-reviews, IPA has a review of evidence (and gaps) on "Building Resilience through Financial Inclusion" that makes a lot more sense to me.
Okay, now to some less-meta items. Well only a little bit I guess. Remember that Karlan and Zinman paper about high-cost loans in South Africa that found positive effects? It was a lending for resilience story. Now there's a company in California offering high-cost loans to people via their landlords, specifically marketed to help them not miss a rent payment or to pay a security deposit. The article mostly ignores fungibility, presuming that the actual use of the loan proceeds are paying rent rather than covering some other emergency, but that seems unlikely to me. In the US Financial Diaries we saw that housing payments were much more erratic than other types of payments, though the data wasn't clean enough to really draw any firm conclusions. So is this a lending-for-resilience story or a new version of payday lending debt traps?
Speaking of payday lending debt traps, we usually use that phrase metaphorically. But there's a UK payday lender who is apparently eager to make it more literal. Yes, they are advocating for a return to debtors' prisons (darn that asymmetric information and moral hazard!). And even doubling down on the idea.
Finally, here's a story (HT Matthew Soursourian) about Kenyan MFIs being driven "to [an] early grave" as digital financial services allow commercial banks and non-banks to siphon off the customer base. Disintermediation was not exactly the story that early proponents of mobile money were hoping for, but it does fit with the historical record of financial systems development. If you know anything about this, or can vouch for the accuracy of the information in the article, I'd love to hear from you.
2. Global Development: I'm going to skip the on-going "shooting fish in a barrel" about OxFam's annual global wealth publicity/outrage stunt since there's nothing at all new there. Better to spend your limited attention on this NYTimes op-ed from Rohini Pande and colleagues on the "new home for extreme poverty."
If you follow these topics at all, you know that new home is middle-income countries like India. The Congress Party's proposal of a not-universal basic income to address the persistence of extreme poverty in the country has been getting a fair amount of attention. Apparently Angus Deaton and Thomas Piketty are advising Congress, though from my experience with politicians "advising" could mean "we read their books." Here's Maitreesh Ghatak's take on what it would take for the policy to work.
On the other side of the world, I've watched the evolving situation in Venezuela with a great deal of personal interest. I grew up in Colombia, a few hours from the Venezuelan border, and learned relatively recently that an ancestor of mine funded an invasion of Venezuela in the early 1800s. Particularly my interest has been caught by some economists volunteering to educate politicians and pop culture figures on what is going on, in the hopes of stopping bad takes. Here, by the way, courtesy of Chris Blattman, is a deeper background piece on the Maduro regime than you may find elsewhere. The macroeconomic quirks of access to gold reserves and of sovereign and not-so-sovereign bonds under sanctions have been pretty interesting too. And here's Cindy Huang of CGD on the potential for Colombia accessing concessional funding to help finance programs for Venezuelan refugees.
Finally, I'm happy to claim, without evidence, that my request for Rachel Glennerster to post her Twitter thread on what she's learned in her first year as DfID's chief economist as a blog post so that was easier to share, cite and archive caused this blog post compiling her Twitter thread.
3. Small Business: My fixation with breaking down the silo between financial inclusion in the US and internationally extends beyond household finance. The story of most small business in the US is the same as it is in developing countries--they are not high-growth "gung-ho" entrepreneurs but frustrated employees trying to generate an income in the face of labor market failures of various sorts. So the perennial development topic of how to increase lending to SMEs should be looking to the US, and those in the US should be looking internationally.
For most small and micro-businesses the biggest financial challenge isn't getting credit to invest, but managing cash flow and liquidity. Square, which has historically been focused on enabling retail consumer-to-business payments, recently announced a new product specifically to tackle this problem: a debit card that allows real-time access to balances. To put it in development-speak, Square is offering trade credit to small merchants to cover the trade credit they provide to customers. I'm super-interested in seeing how well it works.
But, yes, small businesses often need credit as well. Lending to them is as difficult, if not more so, than lending to low-income consumers. Here's a story in the FT on how digital platforms have filled, expensively, a gap left by a secular decrease in small business lending from banks. The key point is that technology is offering several new putative solutions to classic lending problems, including direct and immediate access to small businesses' bank accounts. Supposedly this will prevent the lenders from incurring large losses in a downturn, but you have to wonder about the macro effects of immediately cutting off the supply of credit to small businesses at the first sign of a recession.
Finally, as important as finance is for small business, I think the more important missing capital is human capital. Here's a piece from Next Billion advocating for more funding for human capital interventions which reviews some of the relevant literature.
4. New Year, New You: It's still January in faiV-land, so it's not too late to pledge to learn some new things this year. Say, for instance, practical deep learning (the pinnacle of meta--learning about deep learning). That's a new, free, online course from something called Fast AI. Or perhaps, you'd like to get a better grasp on econometrics (who wouldn't?). Marginal Revolution is rolling out a new free class from Josh Angrist. In the spirit of the source, I'll say it's self-recommending. But maybe you'd like go back to fundamentals. In that case, here's a playlist of Tyler Cowen's 9 most important ideas in economics.
5. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Whenever you think it can't get any worse, that's a big signal that it's about to get worse. Not on topic, but since the story on the world's worst family was such a popular link, last week, here's something even worse. But back to the topic at hand: Facebook being even worse. In this case, by paying teenagers to let the company digitally stalk them. I'm sure all those parental consent forms were authentic. The Facebook stalking broke Apple's rules, and now Apple is the de facto Facebook regulator. Yay?
Central to these issues is the nature of digital identity and what can be done with it based on the necessarily not complete picture that digital tracking provides. You may be comforted sometimes by the thought that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple don't know everything about you. But you should also be scared, because, the limited information is already shaping what you see. Here's a very insightful piece on the limited control you have over your digital identity and how it shapes your world.
And here's a curious effort called Good ID to ensure that digital identities are "good for people as well as for business and government." Which is an idea that I wholly support--even the acknowledgment of the issue is a breath of fresh air. But perhaps they could do a better job of revealing their own identity? This is one of the least informative "who are we"'s I've ever seen. The meta! It burns!
I've decided that in general I'm going to try to make the graphic/video of the week a bit more outside-of-the-box of the rest of the faiV. And this is perfect for the meta theme. People on reddit are painting recursive pictures of people holding their paintings. And there's a github for it. Make sure to click on the change layout button. Source.
