In this edition of the faiVLive, with a group of expert panelists from around the world, we delve into the possibilities for FinTech to serve the poor and reduce inequality. Six years after McKinsey heralded “a new era of digital globalization,” what have we learned about when, and where, FinTech meaningfully advances inclusion, and when it creates a new (digital) divide? When does FinTech (in the words of Greg Chen of CGAP, during this edition of the faiVLive) build a bridge and when does it dig a moat?
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The Wage Garnishment Edition
Editor's Note: I didn't start writing this faiV as an extended rant about financial literacy. It just sort of happened.
Read MoreWeek of January 24, 2020
1. SMEs: So this is kind of old, at least in faiV terms. But it's new to me, and a good illustration of one of the fundamental ideas that underpins how I look at all research/interventions related to SMEs: Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The point the author is making is quite different from what I take from it, so let me explain a bit more. Figuring out how to run a small business, in most contexts where we care about helping people running small businesses--developing countries, marginalized groups or areas in developed countries, other people markets and regulation have failed--is really, really hard because there is a surprising amount of detail at every step in the process. Product, location, competition, marketing, production, accounting, financing, investment--all of them involve a surprising amount of detail, and lots of little ways to get things wrong. But with so much detail it's hard to figure out if something is going wrong, much less what specific thing is going wrong.
At this surprising level of detail we tend to throw programs that either only address one small detail (e.g. incentives for formalization), or lots of details spread out across many tasks (e.g. business training). In both cases we see small or negligible effects for the most part (in part because most impact evaluations of training don't have nearly enough power to detect the size of change we could reasonably expect).
That's a fairly long disquisition to set up that the next faiVLive will be on the topic of SME business training specifically. On February 20th, at 10am Eastern, David McKenzie and I will discuss what we know about SME performance, management, survival and especially training. Register to join us here.
Finally, while I remain one of the holdouts against the term "financial health" (more on that another day), here's a report from my old colleague Piotr Korynski, now at The Microfinance Centre, looking at the application of financial health to SMEs. It's definitely worth a read to start peeling back layers on the surprising level of detail required to really understand what is happening inside SMEs.
2. Cash: At this point I feel like any discussion of the death of cash should come with a mandatory voiceover of Mark Twain saying "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Here's Olivier Usher from Nesta on 2020 being a tipping point in the "cash crash." There are some interesting data points here, and more importantly, some important questions about how payment mechanisms affect behavior, or allow others to control behavior.
The virtual voiceover to this particular death of cash pronouncement is from New York City, where the city council just yesterday approved a regulation requiring all businesses in the city to accept cash as payment. That means that 3 of the 15 largest cities in the US, as well as the entire state of New Jersey have banned the death of cash.
3. Financial Inclusion: Financial inclusion, like cash, has frequently been confined to the dustbin of history in recent years, in favor of other terms. As I mentioned I still prefer inclusion (while noting the irony of the name of the research center I manage) but the reasons that others don't are fair and reasonable. One of the main reasons "inclusion" replaced "access" was the recognition that opening lots of dormant accounts really shouldn't count for anything. But shifting terms didn't really blunt the criticism. Here's Bhavana Srivastava and co. from MSC on when financial inclusion is not inclusive for women, and how to change that. Here's IDEO.org on essentially the same topic, looking at what it will take to include women in the financial system in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and India. And here's Mayada El-Zoghbi on why measures of access and inclusion don't square up with each other.
Bobbi Gray of the Grameen Foundation also has some problems with financial inclusion (sort of)--here's her list of financial inclusion "notions that must die." Of particular note is the third: financial inclusion is always positive. Keep that one in mind while you read this piece on "financial inclusion will see mass market adoption in 2020." If you're wondering what that means, I'm not sure you'll gain much insight from reading it--it's another in a long line of proclamations that "new data" is going to solve all the problems of financial inclusion. But their is one particular sentence that meant I had to link it: "one can only hope that common-sense regulations will enable these technological advances to deliver on their promise of greater financial inclusion." There are so many ways to read that sentence! And most of them aren't encouraging, but are probably right.
To illuminate that somewhat obscure criticism, here's a piece on a highly effective, yet illegal, way to make lending fairer to women. There is no such thing as "common-sense" regulation. This stuff is really, really hard--this would be a good time to go back to the link to Mayada's piece above and read it if you haven't.
Week of October 18, 2019
1. Nobel Prizes: It's a little weird writing about the Nobel going to Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer in the faiV--this is mostly stuff we cover all the time, and it's probably not news at this point to anyone who cares. So it's not entirely clear what to write. But here goes.
First, I have to point out that 1 in 5 people I interviewed for my book have gone on to win a Nobel. So any of you who aspire to future laureate status should probably make time for me (Yes, I'm talking to you Sendhil). All I'm saying is that both an event study or an RDD would show strong indications of causality. Given that my ability to predict the winner of the prize also is remarkable, wouldn't you say now is a great time to recommend subscribing to the faiV to all of your friends?
More seriously, I suppose I should link to some of the responses. From the "pro" camp here's Karthik Muralidharan and here's Pam Jakiela who notes that Esther is the first woman with an economics Ph.D. to win (Elinor Ostrom's Ph.D was in political science) while also noting the quite different family structure of this set of winners in comparison to many in the past (though not, it should be noted, the other Nobelist who won after appearing in my book, Angus Deaton). Here's Tim Harford, who unusually, quickly shifts the focus to Kremer's O-ring theory. On the more neutral side, here's Maitreesh Ghatak.
There's a critical side as well. For example, here's Duvendack, Jolly, Mader and Morvant-Roux on how the prize reveals the "poverty of economics." And here's Grieve Chelwa and Sean Muller with "the poverty of poor economics." I have serious issues with both of these. The Duvendack et al. piece seems to intimate that Esther and Abhijit were pro-microcredit and tried to rescue the sectors reputation from their unexpected results. That is just bizarre--the title of their paper "The Miracle of Microfinance" could be better described as an intemperate twisting of the knife; that's certainly how the microfinance industry felt. Chelwa and Muller accuse the randomistas of "imitating" science but not doing it--which can only mean they are paying very little attention to what happens in other domains of science. Here's a Twitter thread of response to Chelwa and Muller from Oyebola Okunogbe. As Okunogbe points out while pushing back, each of the essays make some good and reasonable points, which is part of what makes the critiques of the RCT movement so maddening: the blending of good points with silly ones blunts the impact of the critics, in my opinion.
Now if you're interested in a long and more balanced, but still critical (in the better, broader sense) take, here's Kevin Bryan's overview at A Fine Theorem.
The next big question for me is what comes next for the RCT movement and it's critics. There are several possible futures. One is that the prize permanently solidifies the value of RCT movement and allows more constructive engagement by proponents with critics since the randomistas no longer have to worry about an existential threat to their work and legacy. Another is that the critics will realize that their long rearguard campaign against the movement has been lost, and rather than devoting energy to grand sweeping critiques of the movement as a whole, will focus on more specific critiques of individual studies, designs, interpretations and findings and the application of research to policy, yielding better overall outcomes. And of course, there is the possibility that this changes nothing and we'll be still be having these same conversations about the use or uselessness of randomized trials in development economics 10 and 20 years from now.
2. Migration: It's here, at long last. Something like 7 years ago, I was talking with Michael Clemens about households, finances, migration and remittances. We got ourselves in a good dudgeon about the way most research approached remittances and agreed we should write a paper about re-conceiving migration as an investment and remittances as a cash flow return on that investment. It took us, I think, about 2 years to actually write the thing. That version turned into a couple of Lego stop motion videos--it was a weird time in the development internet back then--and we submitted it to a journal. Then, 5 years later we got a response. I'm not kidding.
But there's a happy ending. We were invited to revise and update (there was of course a lot to update after 5 years) and re-submit. And this week the finished product is finally published: Migration and Household Finances: How a Different Framing Can Improve Thinking About Migration (though I'll keep thinking of it as "Migration as a Household Finance Strategy").
And since Michael is so prolific on questions of migration, here's a thread from this week, with papers, on the old argument that physically coercing people to stay where they are is justifiable. (Spoiler: it's not).
3. US Inequality: Since the US Financial Diaries, a common refrain around here has been the hidden dimensions of inequality in the US--not just the easily quantifiable things like income or wealth, but the life and work circumstances that amplify and entrench income and wealth inequality. Things like irregular work schedules.
Kristen Harknett and Danny Schneider have been investigating the prevalence and impact of irregular work schedules for a few years. Earlier this year they had a paper about the consequences of irregular schedules on worker health and well-being. They have a new report out on how schedule irregularity "matters for workers, families and racial inequality." Here's an overview of their whole research program with links to other papers, and a very consumable summary from the Center for Equitable Growth.
I mentioned the strange times a few years ago as we all struggled with how to use the tools the internet was serving up to us to better communicate research and ideas. I have to say I'm impressed by the what is in evidence here in the partnership between Harknett and Schneider and the Center for Equitable Growth to get these ideas out through multiple channels.
On not just a US inequality note, I'll be at the Global Inclusive Growth Summit hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and the Aspen Institute on Monday and a Center event on driving financial security at scale on Tuesday. If any faiV readers will be there, be sure to say hello.
Week of September 27, 2019
1. Jobs: I've written a good bit here on the "Great Convergence" from the perspective of financial inclusion--that the US and middle-income countries have more in common in that domain than they have ever had--but another version of the "Great Convergence" is the common focus on jobs in countries across the per-capita income spectrum.
It's useful to put the current convergence in historical perspective--the recognition that creating jobs was critical and that "national champion" industrial development was not creating them played a large role in the development of the microfinance movement. The failure of microcredit to produce much beyond self-employment alternatives to casual labor has brought job creation, and especially job creation through SMEs, back to the top of the agenda of international development. At the same time, the failure of richer economies to produce very many "quality" jobs in the 10 years since the Great Recession (and arguably since the 1970s) or for the foreseeable future has put the question of jobs at the top of the list of concerns for policymakers in those countries.
Paddy Carter, the director of research for CDC (UK, not US), and Petr Sedlacek have a new report on how DFIs and social investors should think about job creation that lays out some of the issues (e.g. boosting productivity can both create and destroy jobs) quite nicely. MIT's "Work of the Future Task Force" also has a new report, this more from the perspective of policymakers in wealthier countries, with a call to focus on job quality more than job quantity. Stephen Greenhouse has a new book on dignity at work, which of course has a lot to do with job quality. Here's a talk he gave recently at Aspen's Economic Opportunities Program.
Seema Jayachandran has a new working paper on a specific part of the jobs conversation: how social norms limit women's labor market participation and what might be done about that. For me it also opens the question about microcredit-driven self-employment being a higher "dignity" job for women in many contexts than the jobs that are available to them otherwise. More on that in a moment.
2. Household Finance: I don't have a lot of links here, just some thoughts from conversations in the last few days. But to kick things off, Felix Salmon had a nice gibe at financial literacy this week that had my confirmation bias going. But in hindsight, I actually disagree: teaching financial literacy actually doesn't seem to be that hard based on the many papers that show that running a class leads to passing a financial literacy test. The hard part is making higher financial literacy pay off in terms of changed behavior. But there I agree with Felix's basic point: higher financial literacy doesn't lead to improved decision making for the poor or the wealthy. The wealthy just have more structure and protection (both formal in terms of regulation and practices at private firms who know better than to routinely screw profitable customers, and informal in terms of slack and cushion) from bad choices. On the flip side, Joshua Goodman has a new paper in the Journal of Labor Economics that finds that more compulsory high school math leads African-American students to complete more math coursework and to higher paying jobs (there's a nice little estimate that the return to additional math courses makes up half of the gains from an additional year of school).
Part one of "more on that in a moment" is that Seema with a rockstar list of development economists (Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer Moore) has another new paper on whether access to, deposits into and training on using a personal bank account affects women's labor supply and gender norms. They find that it does increase women's labor supply and shifts norms to be more accepting of women working. Here's the indispensible Lyman Stone with a somewhat skeptical take on the interpretation of the data.
Finally, in a conversation with Northern Trust this week about their financial coaching work (see a recent summary here) a really fascinating insight came up: people in the coaching programs seem to have much more success when "saving" is framed as "debt reduction" than when it's framed as "saving." These sort of things always grab my attention because Jonathan's paper Borrowing to Save was a seminal piece for my interest and thinking in financial inclusion. But it also got me thinking: what would happen if retirement savings programs were framed as debt + loss aversion? Specifically, if when you started a job, the employer said: "I'm loaning you $10K, deposited into an IRA and you owe me $x monthly, until you pay it off--and if you don't I take it back." Obviously you couldn't run an experiment like that in the US because of regulations, but is there somewhere you could? Maybe someone has already done it? Let me know if you have any thoughts.
Week of May 24, 2019
1. India: This year I resolved to make sure I was paying more attention to events in countries with large populations that aren't the United States, and not just treating them like an instance of a broader class. Given the elections in India, and the somewhat surprising strength of the BJP's performance, this seems like an opportune moment. Here's a Vox explainer on the elections for those of you who, like me, may have been only vaguely aware of the elections as a referendum on Modi vs. (Rahul) Gandhi. Here's an interesting essay on the most important feature of Indian politics not being the rivalry between parties but the generally uncontested move toward closing off civil liberties and a more authoritarian state. Here's 12 reasons why the BJP won, with perhaps the most interesting point being the BJP's efficiency at actually delivering welfare programs rather than just vague promises about future welfare programs. For those of you following along in the US or Australia, or any other country where right-wing populism has experienced a rebirth, there are clear parallels throughout. Here's Shamika Ravi on policy priorities for the new government (written before the election).
There is more than the election going on. So here's a couple of things that may be more of traditional interest to faiV readers. Demonetization was three years ago. Andeverything is back to where it was--maybe this should make programs with "null effects" feel better. And here's a fascinating study of the social lives of married women in Uttarakhand, with a particular emphasis on how "empowerment shocks" spread through social networks and decay over time.
2. Causality and Publishing Redux: A few things popped up related to last week's focus on causality. One point I touched on was spillovers and general equilibrium effects. Here's a note from Paddy Carter of CDC on the tension for DFIs attempting to invest in ways that are "transformative" (read, lots of spillover effects) and measuring their causal impact. I also noted JDE now accepting papers based on per-analysis plans. Pre-registration isn't going so well in psychology where a new study looked at 27 preregistered plans and the ultimate papers and found all of them deviated from the plan, and only one of those noted the change. Brian Nosek's money quote: "preregistration is a skill and not a bureaucratic process." Which could serve as a theme of Berk Ozler's discussion of using pre-registration to boost the credibility of results, not just for an experiment. Very useful for those interested in developing the pre-registration skill.
This may be stretching it a bit, but Raj Chetty's incipient attempt to replace Ec10 at Harvard got a lot of attention this week. There's a lot to recommend his approach, but there are plenty of people who are concerned about the apparent glossing over of causality. I'm honestly worried that some of these things may cause Angus Deaton and other critics of causal claims from RCTs to go into apoplectic fits. Just when you thought some of the messages might be getting through, along comes a new toy. So I should probably not mention that there's an update to the oldDonohue and Levitt paper on abortion and crime that claims it has better evidencewithout dealing with any of the problems in the underlying model.
3. Micro-Digital Finance: Microfinance can be pretty confusing when you get beyond the simple statements and start to worry about how it actually all works, and how it's changing, and what we do and don't know. Hudon, Labie and Szafarz have a nice little primer on those issues with a microfinance alphabet. I wish I had thought of doing this.
I complained last week about "mobile money" not including payment cards, which dominate the United States. But a telecom-driven mobile money product is now available in the US. Well sort of. Not sure what to make of this yet.
Caribou Digital and Mastercard Foundation have a new study of Kenyan microentrepreneurs "platform practices." I also don't know what to make of this, but that's probably because I haven't read it yet, but I figured many of you would be interested.
Among other things it's hard to know what to make of, there's Earnin, a sort-of payday lender, health care cost negotiator, fintech something. It's confusing. And New York State regulators are confused too, which is probably not a good sign for Earnin. But that's nothing new--I have to point again to City of Debtors, a book that documents New York city and state regulators confusion over how to regulate small dollar lending for more than a century.
Week of March 8, 2019
1. The OGs: I can't think about who influences me without beginning with Esther Duflo, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Tavneet Suri (special links to two new papers that would have been in the faiV in a normal week--on the impact of digital credit in Kenya, and UBI in developing countries) and Rachel Glennerster.
2. New Views on Microcredit: Because I'm framing this around research that has influenced me and appeared in the faiV, I've organized these into topical buckets that make sense to me. But keep in mind, that may not be the only thing these economists work on. Cynthia Kinnan and Emily Breza have dug into the Spandana RCT to understand heterogeneity of results, and to used the AP repayment crisis and fallout to understand the general equilibrium effects of microcredit. Natalia Rigol with some of the OGs above followed up on the differential returns to capital between men and women from earlier studies finding the differences are largely due to intrahousehold allocation, not gender; she's also looked into how to better target microcredit to high-ability borrowers. Gisella Kagy and Morgan Hardy uncoverbarriers that women-owned microenterprises face. Rachael Meager creatively usesstatistical techniques to better understand heterogeneity in microcredit impact results. Isabelle Guerin provides insight on why microcredit can go wrong.
3. Savings: I will confess that I have a lot of questions about the savings literature. But that's mainly because of the work of these economists. Pascaline Dupas, of course. Silvia Prina tests encouraging savings in Nepal, while Lore Vandewalle tries to build savings habits in India. Jessica Goldberg runs very creative experiments to understand how savings affects decisions. Simone Schaner studies intrahousehold choices around savings.
Week of February 18, 2019
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.
Week of January 7, 2019
1. The History of Banking: For a project I'm working on I've been thinking a lot about financial system development and have gotten a bit obsessed with the history of banking. You might think that with a topic so core to economic thinking there would be some consensus on things like what banks do and how they came to do them. But you would be wrong. I've had great fun reading conflicting accounts of the history of banking in the US and Germany over the last few weeks. At the AEA exhibit floor I stumbled on a new book about the history of banking in France, Dark Matter Credit. The short version is that informal banking was a massive part of the French economy, and worked better in many ways than French banks until World War I, and it took regulation to finally allow formal banks to displace the informal system. I also picked up Lending to the Borrower from Hell and just in the first few pages discovered that Italian "friars, widows and orphans" were buying syndicated loans to Charles the II of Spain in 1595. The bottom line is that informal finance was much more efficient and "thick" than I believed, and formal banking extended much further much earlier than I had known. There's also a new book on banking crises in the US before the Federal Reserve, Fighting Financial Crises, which is equally relevant to thinking about the much-more-grey-than-you-would-think borderland between formal and informal banking.
To tie this all more specifically to the AEA meetings than just what was on display at the book vendors' booths, one of my favorite sessions was Economics with Ancient Data. Though I'll confess I'm not sure whether to be heartened that things we are doing now can have persistent effects for thousands of years, or depressed that our present was determined by choices thousands of years ago.
2. MicroDigitalHouseholdFinance: There was of course a number of new(ish) papers on our favorite topics, further condensed here. Here's the session on financial innovation in developing countries and one specifically focused on South Asia. Some of these papers have appeared in recent editions of the faiV already, but I want to call out a couple specifically. Microcredit, I've argued, is in dire need of innovation. So I'm always pleased when I see papers on innovation in the core product terms, like this paper from India on allowing flexible repayment, and while it wasn't at AEA,this one in Bangladesh. In both cases, allowing borrowers to skip payments results in higher repayment rates and better business outcomes. I see these as part of an evolving understanding that microcredit is a liquidity-management product, not an investment product. Credit can also be a risk-management product, as long as you know it's going to be there when you need it. That's the story of this paper on guaranteed loans for borrowers in the event of a flood (in Bangladesh). Another cool innovation in microcredit. Of course, the next question is who is going to insure the MFI so that it has the liquidity to make good on emergency loan promises?
There was a session titled "Shaping Norms" that I almost missed out on because of the somewhat oblique title. There were some very interesting papers here on how household preferences get formed, and how they can be changed, including longer-term data on the experiment in Ethiopia that I think of as launching the "changing aspirations" theme that we see more and more of.
I was amused that there were simultaneous sessions on "Finance and Development" and "Financial Development" but the poor Chinese student beside me was very confused as apparently the translations in the official app did a poor job of differentiating between the two. Both had interesting papers, but I found this on the sale of a credit card portfolio from a department store to a bank (which has access to more credit bureau data) in Chile, and this on bank specialization in export markets particularly interesting.
But moving outside of the AEA realm, my confirmation bias prevents me from not including two other related items on Household Finance. First, Matthew Soursourian of CGAP has some pointed questions about the usefulness of "financial health" as a concept, questions I thoroughly endorse. Second, there is documentary evidence (for instance, here) that I've long been skeptical of the story about mothers in developing countries caring about their children while fathers don't. I find it more than vaguely racist as these stories typically only involve countries where the majority of fathers are black or brown. Anyway, at long last someone, specifically Kathryn Moeller, tried to track down one of the more common statistics on women spending more money on children and found that there is no source, and it was apparently made up as part of a marketing campaign. But that's just the start. Seth Gitter links to three studies that find no difference in investment in children (and I'll add the Spandana impact evaluation to his list) and Martin Ravallion points out that the "70% of world's poor are women" stat seems equally unsourced.
3. Entrepreneurship, Reluctant and Otherwise: Overall, the paper that left me thinking the most is a long-term update to the Blattman and Dercon experiment randomizing employment at factories in Ethiopia. If you need a catch-up, the original experiment had three arms: control, a $300 cash grant plus business training and a job in a "sweatshop"-type factory. While there were positive effects for the entrepreneurship group, the jobs didn't improve income and had negative effects on physical health. After five years, all the differences dissipate (hours worked, income, health, occupational choice). Pause to think about that for a moment--after several years of higher incomes from entrepreneurship, the average person in that arm shut down their business. And the control group started microenterprises and got factory jobs (filling the gaps left by the treatment arm participants who dropped out?). It's another piece of a growing puzzle about why microenterprises don't grow, or more specifically why people don't seem to invest in their microenterprises, even when the income is higher than the alternatives. Stuart Rutherford has been thinking about that too, and because it's Stuart, he went out and interviewed participants in the Hrishipara Diaries to try to get some answers.
Week of December 10, 2018
1. Targeting: I intended for the faiVLive conversation to spend more time on targeting than we did--it's a sort of rushed conversation at the end. Targeting is something that I've been thinking about a lot, but I'm not sure what I think yet. So forgive me for just ruminating on a few things here.
The whole concept of microcredit is based on targeting--every lender has to target not only those interested in taking a loan but those interested in repaying a loan. Hand-in-hand with targeting repayers was targeting borrowers who were "entrepreneurs," people who would start a business, since the belief was a new microenterprise was the only plausible way for these very poor households to repay. But since the rhetoric emphasized that the poor were natural entrepreneurs, targeting repayers substituted 1:1 for targeting entrepreneurs. Given the findings of microcredit impact studies--namely that while average impact is minimal, there are people who see large gains--the focus on targeting has returned. See for instance, asking middle men who the best farmers are, or surveying other microenterprises.
But if your aim is reducing poverty, then you have to care about more than just finding the borrowers who will repay and have the highest returns on capital--you have to care about equity as well and the effect on, or exclusion of, the poorest or least able to generate high returns. Earlier this year I linked to a paper by Hanna and Olken on the equity effects of targeted transfers vs. UBI. Here's an interview with the two that summarizes their findings: for most poor countries, targeted transfers far outperform a UBI in terms of total welfare. And by the way, here's new Banerjee et al paper from Indonesia showing limited distortions from proxy-means tests.
Of course, in targeting microcredit we are doing the opposite essentially: looking for a proxy-means test to exclude the least-able to generate high returns. What effects might that have? If we boost market efficiency, it could be good for most everyone. That's not just theoretical--here's an empirical finding from Jensen and Miller on improving market efficiency in Kerala boat-building finding higher aggregate quality, lower production costs and lower quality-adjusted prices. But maybe not. That paper above on using middle-men to target finds that traditional allocation of loans does better for the poorest. And as we discussed on the faiVLive conversation, there can be systematic differences in market structure that limits who can generate high returns (in this case, among women seamstresses in Ghana). It's why I worry about what exactly is being measured in targeting algorithms like EFL/Lenddo.
The possible gains and losses have to be measured against the cost of targeting. The cost of microcredit as it exists, without targeting, is pretty low. The median subsidy per loan is about $25, not much for spreading access to the liquidity management features of microcredit well beyond those with high returns to capital. And then there is reason to think about the effect of greater targeting on the microfinance business model. Here is one of the few economics papers to make me actually angry, suggesting that microcredit contracts were purposefully designed to limit the growth of borrower's businesses. While I wholly reject that claim, the underlying idea is worth considering: microcredit's low relative costs are based on a mass-lending business model and MFIs have largely failed to find a way to compete higher up the banking value chain. Altering that business model could have unintended consequences. That's not just based on that paper. As I mentioned last week, City of Debtors, a book about small sum lending in New York City during the 20th century confirms the business model problem is real and pervasive.
So I don't really know what I think. I'll keep thinking about it, but as always I appreciate your thoughts if you're willing to share them.
2. US Inequality: I haven't covered US Inequality for several weeks, and so things have been building up. And there's been a whole lot of new stuff in the last few weeks. Let's start with the state of median US income over the last 30 years. The widely held current view is that incomes for all but the top quintile or decile have been stagnant. But that's heavily dependent on all the adjustments that need to be made for taxes, transfers, inflation and innovation. Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute summarizes the past and new work trying to measure changes in median income, and then writes in more detail about the methodological issues. One thing that had particularly slipped by me: Picketty, Saez and Zucman have a newish paper updating the famous results that showed stagnation and find median incomes have increased about 30% over the last 30 years. That shifts the proportion of gains by the top decile from around 90% to around 50% (I'm intentionally rounding these numbers because they are so sensitive to methodological choices, that I think we're all better off not reporting precise numbers because of the illusion of certainty that goes along with them). Perhaps one of the reasons that these new findings didn't seem to get as much attention as the idea of stagnation for the middle class, is that the new paper also finds that stagnation is true for the bottom 50% of the income distribution.
This week the US Census also released it's "Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates" for 2017, with county-level data on incomes and poverty rates. They find that over the last 10 years, median incomes in 80% of US counties were unchanged, with 11% of counties seeing an increase and 8% seeing a decrease. When you look at the maps, it's apparent that a majority of the counties seeing an increase are related to the fracking boom (and thus mostly in places with very few people). On the poverty front, there's a whole lot of stagnation too, with almost 90% of counties seeing no change, but 8% seeing an increase and only 3% seeing a decrease. Not an encouraging picture.
Whenever you talk about incomes and poverty, it's worthwhile to think about the definition of poverty. Here's Noah Smith on updating the definition of poverty to include volatility (though he shockingly fails to mention the US Financial Diaries). And here's Angus Deaton on "How America poverty became fake news"--with some more methodological detail and the horrid engagement of the present administration with international attempts to measure poverty.
There's plenty new on the policy front as well. Here's a new paper estimating the total budget effect of the EITC--finding that the program self-finances 87% of its cost by reducing use of other transfer programs and increasing taxes collected. And here's The Hamilton Project on the work histories of people receiving SNAP and Medicaid benefits, finding that the majority are working, but irregularly and a substantial portion would "fail to consistently meet a 20 hour per week-threshold" because their hours worked vary so much from week-to-week.
