The Special Service Edition
1. MicroDigitalFinance (and women): Questions about gender and financial inclusion have been a part of the modern microfinance movement since the beginning, when Yunus made those initial loans to women. For a long time, the accepted wisdom was that women were more responsible borrowers, repaid at higher rates, and did better things with their earnings than men. Then came several waves of research that called that into question--finding, for instance, that men had much higher returns to capital; that women didn't spend money that differently (outside of the social norms that constrained both their income-earning and -spending choices).
Recently there has been another swing. For me it started with suggestive evidence from Nathan Fiala's grants vs. loans to men and women in Uganda that women's average low returns were driven by the women who had the hardest time protecting money from male relatives--something that didn't make it into the published paper (so factor that into your Bayesian updating). Then Bernhardt, Field, Pande and Rigol re-analysed data from the original returns to capital work and found that women who operated the sole enterprise in their household had returns as high as men. Then Hardy and Kagy dug into why returns to men and women's tailoring businesses were so different in Ghana.
Now Emma Riley has a new paper going to back to Uganda and using mobile money accounts to give a much more definitive answer to the control of funds issue that Fiala's work hinted at. Working with BRAC (it occurred to me yesterday that I think all the subsidy to global microfinance could be reasonably justified just by BRAC), she provided female business owners with a separate mobile money account to receive their loan proceeds--the theory being, of course, that this would allow them to protect the funds much better. She finds that women who received the money in the private mobile accounts had 15% higher profits and 11% higher business capitalthan controls who received the money in cash. There are number of possible mechanisms, but she finds the best explanation is indeed the ability to protect money from the family. This is a big deal.
And last year when I posted a story about Uganda implementing a social media and mobile money tax, I didn't really take it seriously. It turns out I should have. The tax went into effect and Ugandans have behaved like good homo economicuses: mobile money use and social media use is down. Say, that suddenly sounds like a useful policy intervention.
Finally, this rang my confirmation bias bell so hard that there's no way I could leave it out or even wait another moment to put it in the faiV. Maybe I'll include it in every edition from here on out. There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology.
2. Youth Unemployment: This wasn't supposed to be "the Uganda edition" but in other women in Uganda research news, here's a paper from a star-studded list of researchers starting with Oriana Bandiera (is it just me or has Selim Gulesci had a remarkably productive last 12 months?) forthcoming in AEJ:Applied on a program to empower adolescent Ugandan women with both vocational and sex/relationship education. They find large effects after 4 yours, boosting the number engaged in income-generating activities (all microenterprise) by 50% (5pp) and cutting teen pregnancy and reported unwanted sex by a third. That's impressive. But your homework assignment is to square these results with the five year follow-up results of Blattman and Fiala's grants to Ugandan teenagers (where all the effects fade out after 9 years) and Brudevold-Newman, Honorati, Jakiela and Ozier vocational training program for young Kenyan women where effects of training and grants dissipate after 2 years. Seriously, this is your homework. Email me with your theories. If you can work in Blattman and Dercon's Ethiopia follow-up (which as disappeared from the web, hopefully temporarily), any of the other papers from this session at ASSA2018, or McKenzie's review of vocational training programs, you get extra credit.
3. Economic History: I've mentioned a couple of times recently that I've been delving into Economic History to learn a bit more about financial system development and the history of banking and consumer financial services. It's been fascinating so I thought I would share a few links in that vein. There are two books that top the list, both of which I think I've mentioned, but since I now consider these as must-reads for anyone interested in financial services along with Portfolios of the Poor, The Poor and Their Money, Due Diligence, and, y'know, cough, cough cough, I'm going to mention them again. City of Debtors covers the tragically unknown history of microcredit in the United States from the 1890s on. Insider Lending is the story of how banking evolved in New England from the 1800s, specifically how economic and political forces turned something entirely self-serving for existing elites into a vital service for the masses.
If you're intrigued by what can be learned from economic history but aren't ready to dive into a book, here's a new paper on the development of a French village from 1730 to 1895, an era very similar to conditions in many middle-income countries today. But if you're not ready for even that level of commitment, try this new Twitter account: @EmpireRomanHoly. There's a daily thread on one of the thousands of semi-independent principalities that made up the neither Holy nor Roman nor Empire. Or try this single thread about a forgotten Indian empire (though since I'm Peruvian-by-birth I have to say he gets the comparisons to the glorious Incan Empire all wrong).
4. Our Algorithmic Overlords: I was going to give the algorithms a rest, but well, it turns out the Overlords never sleep. Well, actually, apparently they were asleep at the switch so to speak. Some Chinese company left their facial recognition database being used to track Muslims in the country exposed online.
And here's Stephanie Wykstra on some university's attempts to teach ethics to the programmers who are going to be building our overlords. I wonder if any of them have a satellite campus in China?
5. Service Journalism: For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, service journalism is the term of art for those articles like, "Five Ways to Eat Healthier Today" or "How to Delete Facebook From Your Phone." In my case, I often get questions about some of the tools I use, so herewith is some insight into the faiV (and my other work) behind the scenes. First up is Asana, which I apparently use in a somewhat unusual way. I've never been able to consistently use task/to-do list/project management software, which is the main use case for Asana, consistently. But a few years ago, Asana introduced a "bulletin board" style view which I now use religiously to track papers and sources whenever I'm working on a big project. I've used it for years to keep track of things for the faiV, but since the start of the year I've been experimenting with a new tool for Chrome called Workona(the tag line is "browse like it's your job" which feels a bit on the nose for me). In case it wasn't clear I'm one of those people who has upgraded every one of my machines to 16GB solely to cope with the 100+ tabs I have open on each of 4 computers I use regularly. Workona allows you to group those tabs usefully, share them between machines, suspend tabs your not using, and some other cool things. It's free for now, tough a paid model is coming, but I will be the first in line to pay because I find it so useful.
Another tool I use everyday is Synergy which allows me to park two machines beside each other and use them as one nearly seamless machine. My normal work set-up has 4 screens--two laptops side by side, each connected to a 24-inch external monitor.
Finally, I just stumbled across Perma.CC, which though I haven't used it yet, seems like something I've been looking for for a long time--a way to make sure that links don't rot. Check it out.
Keeping with the service journalism, this week I learned that pangolins are bi-pedal and I think everyone needs to know that too. You're welcome.
