1. Microfinance: October 2nd was the 10th anniversary of what I consider to be an underappreciated but critical moment in the history of the microfinance movement--David Roodman's piece on how Kiva actually worked. David had already been working on a book about microfinance that was going to be very influential--his open book blog as a whole is a remarkable contribution to the public good, one I wish many more people had decided to replicate--but the Kiva post (based on it being one of the most read blog posts in CGD history according to Justin Sandefur) brought a huge amount of attention to questions about how not only Kiva, but microfinance as a whole, actually worked. I re-read it this week and it's as good as I remember it and definitely makes me pine for the brief glorious time where the development blogosphere was a thing.
There's another important anniversary this week for global microfinance though with a less arbitrarily neat number--Muhammad Yunus's Peace Prize was 13 years ago. Today many were surprised that Greta Thunberg didn't win. The explanation seeming to be both timing and the fact that there is not a direct link between climate change and conflict. There may be a narrowing of the scope of the Peace Prize given that there is certainly no connection between microcredit and reduced conflict. In case you didn't know the winner was Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, who has done some pretty impressive things directly related to peace, like ending the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia and freeing thousands of political prisoners. For what it's worth the Economics Nobel announcement is Monday so expect to see more about that in next week's faiV. Some favorites with particular applicability to the faiV include some combination of Donald Rubin, Josh Angrist, John List and Guido Imbens for kicking off "the credibility revolution" and Michael Kremer, Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Duflo and/or John List for kicking off the experimental revolution. Of course, I'm hoping for the latter because it would likely give a pretty significant boost to my book sales.
But back to microfinance. Banerjee, Emily Breza, Townsend and Vera-Cossio have a new paper (presented at NEUDC) that uses the Townsend Thai village data and the expansion of a credit program to further bolster what should be the clear consensus on the effect of microcredit: on average not much, but very high returns for some. In this case, they find that there are very large gains for high productivity households who get access to credit (1.5 baht increase in profits for every 1 baht increase in credit) and even higher for those outside agriculture. This is broadly similar to earlier work, now in an NBER paper form, by Banerjee, Breza, Duflo and Cynthia Kinnan on Indian microfinance. Keep in mind, as we continue to see these results, that there is another side of the coin: is there a business model that can reach the high productivity borrowers more exclusively?
2. Inequality: If you think about within-country inequality, you think about taxes. Since the United States has had a huge explosion of income and wealth inequality in the last few decades, and there is a presidential election (hopefully) just over a year away there is a lot of discussion about the US tax system and how it has contributed to the growth of inequality and how it might be used to reduce it. This week there has been a lot of focus particularly on whether the US tax system is progressive or regressive, which seems intuitively like it should be a pretty straightforward question to answer. But the US tax system is so complicated, including not only collecting but distributing cash, it's a controversial question. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make the case that since the 1950s the US tax system has shifted dramatically toward being regressive. Here's David Leonhardt's shorter version of their argument with cool animated graphics. But not everyone agrees and those differences can't be traced just to ideology. Here's a thread from Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Obama debating Zucman on methodology and interpretation. Here's David Splinter with a more in-depth analysis illustrating why Saez and Zucman get such different numbers than the traditional approaches to analyzing progressivity.
Meanwhile, there is an entirely different question about whether taxes can be used to effectively address inequality (Saez and Zucman's book is all about how the wealthy evade taxes). There's a new NBER paper on the response of rich taxpayers to an increase in the California tax rate. It finds that just under 1% of those subject to the higher taxes moved out of state, and those who stayed found ways to avoid the tax, so that total income from the tax was about half of what it would have been otherwise. Here's Lyman Stone's Twitter summary.
It's not clear how to think about that 50% cut in additional revenue: on the one hand, there is a big increase in tax collection, on the other hand you have to expect that over time people are going to get even better at evading the tax. Here's Lily Batchelder and David Kamin with a comprehensive review of wealth taxation in implementation with hope that wealth taxes can work.
Viewing all posts with tag: Payments
Week of June 14, 2019
1. FinLit Redux: A few weeks ago I had an op-ed in the Washington Post bemoaning the ongoing emphasis on financial literacy training. David Evans had an issue with one particular sentence in that op-ed, not about financial literacy, but about the effectiveness of information interventions. Here's his list of 10 studies where providing information (alone) changes behavior. And I suppose my inclusion of this is another piece of evidence supporting his point? On the other hand, here's a long, rambling essay from the president of the (US) National Foundation for Financial Education which is one of the finest examples I've ever seen of not just moving the goalposts but denying they even exist. He's got all the greatest hits: don't evaluate based on current practice because we're changing; don't evaluate based on average practice, because of course there are bad programs; don't evaluate based on standard measures because programs vary; don't pay attention to negative stories because they are "old and tired"; and even, "hey look over there!" Is there an emoji for scream of helpless rage?
The reason I find such defenses so enraging is because the huge amount of resources being poured into financial literacy could be put to so much better use that actually are likely to help people. Here's a piece looking at one of the specific trade-offs: financial literacy distracts from the very real need to protect consumers from bad actors. That's not just theoretical. The (US) CFPB is actually shifting from consumer protection to education. Where's that scream of helpless rage emoji again?
2. Household Finance and Regulation: Thinking about consumer protection and the role and value of financial literacy requires thinking about household finance. Fred Wherry, Kristin Seefeldt and Anthony Alvarez have a short essay on how to think about these issues, with several sentences I wish I had written, including, "Stop treating the borrowers as if they are ignorant or irresponsible. And start treating the lenders as if they are inefficient (and sometimes malicious) providers of needed financial services."
There is a tension there, however, that I think too often gets short shrift. Consumer protection regulation necessarily involves removing some choices, and therefore some agency, from consumers. I hope to write more about this, but here is Anne Fleming, (author of City of Debtors which I've been citing frequently) writing aboutthe trade-offs in the caps on interest rates proposed by some prominent Democrats. Making those trade-offs also requires regulators to decide what consumers really want. And that's not always so clear--for instance, here's a look at how "social meaning of money" sociological frameworks do a better job of predicting behavior in retirement accounts than behavioral or rational actor models. And of course the needs and desires of consumers vary so you're not just trading-off between choice and protection but between the needs and desires of different consumers. Yes, this is a bit of a stretch, but here's an article about how women are carving out their own niche in a bit of the household finance world that has been dominated by white men.
Now I recognize that all of this so far is about things going on in the US. But as I frequently argue, the US has a lot more relevance to global conversations than is generally recognized. For instance, here's a story about Facebook turning into a platform for the kind of informal insurance networks we talk about so often in developing countries.
3. Digital Finance: That's a reasonable segue into digital finance, especially since the piece quotes Mark Zuckerberg's ambition to make money as easy to send as a picture (which, y'know, isn't actually very ambitious given that a billion+ people can already do that). But in Hong Kong a lot of them are choosing these days not to do it. Well, at least not to use digital tools to make purchases. Why? Because they are worried that the government will use the data trail to identify who is participating in protests. It's a well-founded worry not just in Hong Kong but around the world, and one that digital finance advocates should be taking much more seriously. And no, cryptocurrency is not in any way a solution for this.
Week of December 3, 2018
1. faiVLive Background: The motivation for the faiVLive experiment is discussing what to think about microcredit impact given all the research in recent years. If you can't make it, or if you can, here's your quick cheat sheet to the recent research.
Of course it's starts with the average impact of microcredit being very modest. A Bayesian Hierarchical model look at the data confirms those findings. But there is important heterogeneity hidden within those average effects--"gung-ho" microborrowers do see substantial gains from increased access to credit. It's also true that these are mostly studies of expanding access to formal credit, not introducing it. That's hard to measure, but we can get a cleaner view of the value of credit when it gets taken away from most everyone--and that shows significant benefits, though through a somewhat unexpected channel: casual labor wages. Changes in labor wages can matter a lot for understanding the impact of a program, even entirely masking any benefits of an intervention with evidence that it makes a substantial difference in many contexts. And it's clear that changes in labor supply are quickly passed through into labor rates--in this case, the markets seem to be working fairly well. But it's not just labor markets. When microcredit affects local markets--by increasing or decreasing the supply of tradeable goods--the benefits may be substantial but mostly captured by the people who aren't using microcredit (what economists call general equilibrium effects). Which makes it all the more important to understand local market dynamics, especially when in many cases microenterprises are operating in sectors where supply exceeds demand. That being said, microcredit is a cheap intervention relative to other options. And it's possible we could increase the returns to microcredit for more reluctant microenterprise operators by boosting their aspirations. Or perhaps by doing better targeting of lending. But is it worth targeting? Households do seem to do a pretty good job of allocating access to capital to its most productive use within the household, and the gung-ho entrepreneurs are benefiting even without the expense of targeting.
2. MicroDigitalFinance and Household Finance: I suppose all of the above would qualify here as well, but here's a bunch of different new stuff, starting with the digital side of things. There are two new papers about the effects of SMEs adopting digital payments. In Kenya, an encouragement intervention led to 78% of treated restaurants and 28% of pharmacies adopting Lipa Na m-Pesa, and consequent increases in access to credit. In Mexico, a different kind of encouragement--the government distributed massive numbers of debit cards as part of the Progresa program--led small retailers to adopt POS terminals. That led to wealthier customers shifting some of their purchasing to these smaller retailers, and increased sales and profits for the retailers, but not an increase in employees or wages paid. On a side note, it's curious that the smaller shock of debit card distribution (pushing debit card ownership to 54% of households) had a large effect on retailers but the larger shock of m-Pesa being adopted by practically everyone has not led to more Lipa Na m-Pesa adoption.
A few weeks ago I featured a puzzle in savings from two savings encouragement experiments--the encouragement worked but savings plateau at a level well below what would seem optimal. Isabelle Guerin sent me a couple of papers that I'm still reviewing that might help explain why, but this week I stumbled across another example. The US CFPB, back in the days when it was allowed to do stuff and wasn't a hollow shell of existential dread, ran an experiment using American Express Serve cards and the "Reserve" functionality. They find that encouraging savings works--people boost their savings--but that the savings plateau after the 12 week encouragement and stay at roughly the same level for 16 months. That's consistent with the results from India and Chile but not with a model of accumulating lump sums or precautionary savings. You would expect among this population that they would experience a shock in that 16 month period and draw down the savings. Participants say they reduce payday loan use, but frankly I don't believe any claims about payday behavior that isn't based on administrative data (and it doesn't make sense if balances were stable).
And finally because I want to encourage this behavior, Maria May sent me an interesting new paper on offering microcredit borrowers flexibility in repayment--customers get two "skip payment" coupons to use during the term of their 12 month loan cycle. Consistent with the much earlier work from Field et al, it yields more investment from borrowers, better outcomes and lower defaults.
3. Evidence-Based Policy: I noted last week that GiveWell, where I have served on the board since it's founding, released it's Top Charity recommendations. One of those is GiveDirectly. GiveWell, as is it's wont, wrote up some details of it's analysis of GiveDirectly, particularly about spillovers from cash transfers. That analysis was significantly informed by a forthcoming paper on general equilibrium effects and spillovers from one of GiveDirectly's programs that GiveWell was given access to even though it is not yet public. Berk Ozler took issue with that. And GiveWell responded. I have nothing whatsoever to do with GiveWell's research process or conclusions, but I was heavily involved advising GiveWell on its response to Berk's questions.
First Week of May, 2018
1. Microfinance, Part I (Uses of Credit): For the first time in forever, it seems there's enough new and interesting stuff on microfinance to support not only one, but a couple multiple-link items. Let's start with a useful piece that summarizes findings from several studies that have loomed large in our understanding (or questions about) of how microenterprises use credit, and apparent differences between male-owned and female-owned enterprises. I do find the framing a bit odd, as I don't know anyone who interpreted the results as "women aren't as good at running microenterprises as men" rather than, "women tend to be constrained to operating microenterprises in less profitable industries." When the newer results from Bernhardt, Field, Pande and Rigol emerged, I think the standard take was, "Households optimally allocate credit to their highest-return enterprise." So I think the intriguing thing here is not "women vs men entrepreneurs" but "maybe the industries women are concentrated in aren't less profitable after all." And that makes me think back to a paper from AEA (there's no version online that I can find, but this seems to be a significantly revised version using the same data) finding that female tailors in Ghana earn less than male tailors because they are constrained to making womens' clothes, a sector where there is more competition and lower prices.
Another use of credit for poor households is not to invest in a microenterprise but to smooth consumption when income is seasonal (or volatile for other reasons). Here's a new paper from Fink, Jack, and Masiye examining that dynamic in rural Zambia. Providing credit during the lean season affects the labor market, allowing liquidity-constrained farmers to avoid wage labor for their comparatively less-constrained neighbors, and pushes up wages. The intriguing thing here is another piece of evidence on the general equilibrium effects of microcredit via commodity (in this case, labor) markets.
2. Microfinance, Part II (Everything Else): Well, not everything else, see item 4. Access to credit and other financial services is a tricky thing--and it's not just the financial system that affects it, the justice system, criminal and civil, matters a lot too. Here's a new paper on alternative credit scoring using digital footprints--I haven't read it yet but am generally very skeptical of things like this. Grassroots Capital and CGAP are hosting a webinar on May 15th under the heading "Microfinance: Revolution or Footnote?" based on a conference last year (full disclosure, I was a participant). Of course, now I would want it to be called "Revolution, Footnote, or General Equilibrium Effects Eat Us All in the Long Run?" And applications are open for the 2018 European Microfinance Awards (until May 23) with the theme "Inclusive Finance through Technology." Whoever said the faiV didn't have news you could use?
3. Methods/Statistics/Etc: Here's even more service journalism: A tool that will convert charts into data points automatically. I actually expect this to be the most clicked link in the history of the faiV. RAs, the robots are coming for your jobs sooner than you think.
Does everyone who cares about statistics read Andrew Gelman's blog regularly? Just in case, there were several posts recently that drew my attention. One is a fairly-standard-but-always-useful post about a specific example of dubious practices, on early childhood education (which morphs into some commentary on how the field of economics deals with these issues with a bonus appearance from Guido Imbens in the comments); another is a pointer to a new paper that tries to avoid some of the more dubious practices on a topic of a lot of interest and a lot of noise--the relationship of macro-growth and child development. But the most interesting is a post about how economists tend to see the world, specifically explaining why apparent bad behavior is good, and apparent good behavior is bad. Behavior in the economics profession is the best segue I can find into this short (audio) interview with Claudia Goldin.
But back to the use and misuse of metrics and statistics. If you don't click on anything else under this item, I do think you should look at these last two links. First, a thread about how most of the world thinks about statistics--as a tool for arriving at the answer you're looking for. And a column from Justin Fox on how pro- and anti-metrics authors end up in basically the same place--measurement is hard, and is only useful if you put the effort into doing it right.
Week of August 1, 2017
1. More Ranting (Low-Quality Equilibria and Digital Currency): Following up on my rant last week about the prevalence of low-quality or sub-optimal equilibria because people have such a hard time figuring out what matters, here's another paper that caught my attention because it so thoroughly confirms my priors. The basics: a field experiment provided repair technicians with varying amounts and frequency of feedback. Performance suffered when feedback was weekly versus monthly because the technicians overreacted to each report. In other words, they had a hard time figuring out which details mattered to their own performance. The study could inspire another about "isomorphic mimicry" and the technology of management but I'll save that for another time.
Instead, I'll move on to a different rant about digital finance. In my world, there's only a tenuous connection between the digital finance groups and the cryptocurrency (e.g. BitCoin) groups, but the former certainly should be paying attention to the latter. As Matt Levine put it this week (again, he says this a lot): "The job of the cryptocurrency revolutionaries is to re-learn all of the old lessons of modern finance, one at a time, in public, in embarrassing ways." Right now those old lessons being re-learned seem particularly focused on how hard it is to manage and secure a money supply. I really hope that the digital finance advocates are paying attention to how often various "unhackable" and "secure" cryptocurrencies are being hacked. The spirit of Willie Sutton lives on, and as more "money" is stored in digital form, there will inevitably be more theft. And there's very little reason to believe that average users will employ security practices better than the supposed sophisticated users currently adopting cryptocurrencies. I fear though that the fate of much of digital finance is to "re-learn all of the old lessons of financial services, one at a time, in public, in especially embarrassing ways because they ignored the cryptocurrency movement's repeated mistakes."
2. Global Development (rants): On to more traditional faiV-ing. Kevin Starr has a new rant on the many outside groups making hay over government-funded private schools in Liberia (We need a hashtag to go along with #lantrant, I'm proposing #starrant). Someone once told me there were a lot less education experiments in the US than in other countries because more people were paying close attention and fighting any policy experiments where the outcomes were not already known. That may have been true, but it's certainly not true anymore in Liberia at least. Kevin's plea is to let the Education Minister do his job.
And here's a rant (with a link to another) against the "getting better" narrative that points out how much the world has improved, to the point where it is certainly the best time in history to be alive. I find the argument here pretty annoying, but not annoying enough to rant about myself. Pointing out that fewer children are dying of malnutrition and more people can read (for instance) in no way implies "this is fine."
In fact it's far more common for the "getting better" crowd to argue for more and for taking risks to make more progress, rather than settling for the status quo as Kottke says they are. In that vein, philosopher Peter Singer is probably the best known advocate for doing more, particularly associated with the "drowning child" thought experiment. Except it's not always an experiment. Last week, French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle died while trying to rescue some actual drowning children. She was particularly known for her work on taking risks.
Week of January 2, 2017
1. In Memoriam: The new year began with news of the deaths of two important thinkers on development, economist Tony Atkinson and philosopher Derek Parfit. Here's Tony Atkinson's view of his most important work. Here's a celebratory post from the World Bank's Let's Talk Development blog, here's Beatrice Cherrier's overview of his work as the "founder of modern public economics," and here's a Foreign Affairs piece of Tony's from late 2015, as always focused on inequality and what can practically be done about it. I'll save links for Parfit until next week.
2. Microcredit: I have a new post at Next Billion on what I consider to be one of the most important new research papers on microcredit, an examination of the size and prevalence of subsidy by Cull, Demirguc-Kunt and Morduch. It documents that subsidy is widespread but small--in other words, that delivering pro-poor financial services isn't free, but that it is cheap. Over at CGAP, Greta Bull offers her thoughts on the four drivers of change for financial inclusion in 2017. And here are the most influential posts of 2016 at Next Billion.
3. Cash Aid and Basic Income: I'm trying not to turn the faiV into a cash and basic income newsletter, but it is a topic that is drawing a lot of attention lately. In the UK, one of the tabloids attacked aid for giving cash to poor people (as opposed to giving cash to rich people?). The Atlantic ran a piece about the history of cash aid in philanthropy and how it is changing current practice. Here's a short history of the idea of basic cash income and here's a round up of both history and current things going on. If you're at #ASSA2017, there's a reception Saturday night to learn more about the Y Combinator basic income experiment in Oakland.
Read MoreWeek of December 12, 2016
1. Effective Altruism: It's the right time of year to be talking about charitable giving--most US-based charities take in about 50 percent of their annual revenue during the month of December. Here is GiveWell's list of recommended charities this year (NB: I'm on the board of GiveWell). Jennifer Rubinstein has a new essay about the "hidden curriculum" of effective altruism, as seen in Peter Singer's and Will MacAskill's books. There's always a hidden curriculum isn't there?
2. Evidence-Based Policy: Effective Altruism shares a curriculum, hidden or not, with evidence-based policy. At Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jennifer Brooks of the Gates Foundation has a post making the case for evidence-based decision-making. I suspect that prior to November 8th most readers of this newsletter wouldn't have thought the case needed to be made. One of Brooks' key points is the need for better data from rigorous evaluations so that there is evidence not just on effectiveness of a particular program, but information on how to improve other programs' performance. That just so happens to be one of the points in the conclusion to my shortly to be available book on the use of RCTs in development economics. You're running out of time to buy a copy for a holiday gift. It won't arrive until January regardless, but it's the thought that counts right? Oh wait--the whole point of effective altruism and evidence-based policy is that it's not the thought that counts.
3. African Bank Failures: It doesn't make the global news, but there have been a number of bank failures in sub-Saharan Africa in the last few months: Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, and Uganda have all closed banks since the beginning of October. At FSDAfrica, Mark Napier looks at whether there's a trend to be concerned about. He forecasts a "rocky ride" for African banks, and lots of work for bank regulators, in 2017.
Read MoreWeek of November 11, 2016
1. Demonetization in India: It doesn't seem like I'm the only one who's a bit confused by exactly what's happening in India and why this particular set of steps will yield the stated outcomes. Here's my current understanding: Last week, the government declared that 500 and 1000 Rupee notes would no longer be legal tender, effective immediately. Except that those notes could be exchanged for new notes until December 31 at banks and post offices. But only by people with official government ID. The purpose is to drive more of the economy into the formal sector and to clamp down on black market activity and corruption. Usually advocates of this sort of step talk about high denomination bills (which they say facilitates corruption by making it relatively easy--in terms of size and weight--to transport large sums) like $100 bills. But 1000 Rupees is roughly $15 and a new 500 Rupee note will be in use and other large denominations like 2000 Rupees will also continue to exist.
As you can imagine, when 86% of the currency in circulation by value has to be immediately exchanged, there are some problems. Of particular interest to faiV readers might be the effect on microfinance banks, which are not allowed (as of now) to accept or exchange the old notes. That apparently has caused repayment to plummet since people can't get their hands on legal notes to make their payments. There's also a surge in use of ATMs and people signing up digital finance systems. Of course, then there's the problem that roughly 30 percent of the population (a mere 300 million people) doesn't have official ID (not counting the additional millions who are short-term migrants and don't have their ID with them where they currently are). Lot's more to come on this story I'm sure.
2. Digital Payments and State Capacity: Dan Radcliffe of the Gates Foundation has a new paper (published by CGD) on the knock-on benefits of government-to-citizen digital payments infrastructure. Direct transfers have already shown significant benefits in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of social welfare programs. Radcliffe argues that other benefits also deserve attention, specifically "strengthening energy policy, food security, government transparency" and overall state capacity.
Week of July 18, 2016
1. Why not What: Chris Blattman posts notes from a recent talk he gave at DfID arguing that focusing too much on "what works?" is a mistake. Via Ryan Briggs on Twitter, here's Angus Deaton's 2010 paper making much the same argument.
2. Why not What, Part II: A new paper from Buera, Kaboski and Shin looks at a host of "well-identified evaluations of the impacts of micro-financial interventions" including the microcredit evaluations, the targeting the ultrapoor programs, and cash grants to try to understand why the results are what they are.
3. American Financial Security (or lack thereof): Americans confidence is their ability to afford retirement is creeping up again, but it's not clear why. A new HSBC study finds that 64% of respondents over age 70 are financially supporting others. Andrew Yarrow writes about "the 45%" who are paid less than $15/hour, are "asset poor" and do not have access to employer-sponsored retirement-savings (note that these are not all the same people).
Week of September 7, 2015
1. Migration and Finance: We wanted to include a story on how refugees are financing their migration *and managing payments* but we couldn't find any. Do you know of one? Tweet it to us - @financialaccess.
2. Cash Transfers: Data from The Cash Atlas, an online platform that tracks cash transfers, suggests transfers are a growing (but still small) component of humanitarian interventions but are mostly conditional and/or mixed with in-kind transfers. Center for Global Development
3. US Financial Diaries: "Six months a year the [USFD] households we tracked had income that was either 20 percent above or below their average. So even the concept of average [income] is meaningless.” Next City
