1. FinTech Charters: Just as the industry takes off for summer vacation, the US Treasury Department released its long-awaited fintech report and the OCC issued a call for fintech charter submissions. I’ve spent the past week sorting through scores of analyses and reactions. Here's American Banker on takeaways from the Treasury report and from the OCC's announcement. What does this mean for all things financial inclusion and innovation? Well, it certainly opens the door for many providers to expand their reach and their potential impact. It will likely be an expensive and involved path, but one that could ultimately give some fintechs much needed lift. However, this is still early in the game. I would expect to see lawsuits and challenges from incumbents now that the charter program is official.
2. Financial Stress and the Lunar Cycle: For many consumers, the end of the month represents constant instability as accounts are reduced to zero and bills become due. While income volatility is the umbrella issue, the specific actions that trigger this instability on a cyclical basis live both in our minds and in the products we use. One of our Entreprenuers-in-Residence, Corey Stone, tackles some big thinking on the topic in his series End of the Month. Drop in regularly to learn more about how human behavior can lead to suboptimal decision making, why long accepted product standards lead to this paucity of funds at the end of the month, and other insights into our monthly budgeting woes.
3. The Gig Economy: The difference between 4% and 40% is pretty significant. And the fact that the US Government doesn’t know how big the gig economy is, in short, a problem. To be fair, it’s not all the government’s fault. The variance in numbers can be attributed to a wide range of perceptions about what constitutes gig employment: full-time, part-time, etc. But no matter what the measurement, the impact is real. Gig employees enjoy the benefits of self-determination, but can often miss out on many of the benefits of traditional employment like insurance, savings vehicles, and more. The result can be regular cash flow gaps and challenging financial tradeoffs. To better design products and create guardrails, it’s imperative that we all find a better – more credible – way to measure this new workforce reality.
Week of July 23, 2018
1. Food Fights and Methods: First, over on the Economics That Really Matters blog, Paul Christian and Chris Barrett summarize their paper on US food aid and conflict. They call into question the results of an influential paper finding a causal link between US food aid and conflict. The authors follow up with a methodological note on the use of instrumental variables with panel data.
Next, the most recent issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) has a nice article, comment, and response. In the article Ore Koren finds that it is food abundance, rather than food scarcity, that causes conflict across Africa. Marshall Burke writes in a comment that the effect sizes are implausibly large and are at odds with previous research. Koren responds to these comments by offering three explanations for the "implausibly" large effect sizes.
2. Randomistas are our new Algorithmic Overlords: At the development economics section of the NBER Summer Institute, Esther Duflo delivered a lecture entitled, "Machinistas meet Randomistas: Some useful ML tools for RCT researchers". Slides from the lecture are available here, and Dina Pomeranz was live Tweeting the lecture. The paper it was based on is here. On the surface it may seem like machine learning and RCTs are interested in different parts of empirical research--the former focused on prediction and the latter focused on causal identification. Duflo highlights a couple areas where using machine learning when analyzing an RCT can be beneficial.
3. Informal Insurance: In a recent article on VoxDev, Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig summarize some of the insights from their 2016 paper on the impact of rural informal insurance networks on rural-urban migration in India. The authors first point out that the rural-urban migration rate is relatively low in India compared to other similar countries. The explanation for this is the presence of well-functioning rural informal insurance markets. In order for these informal markets to function well, however, mechanisms must exist to prevent households from reneging on their obligations to their network. A key way this plays out is in restrictions on mobility. This raises a question: What would happen if formal insurance were introduced? Munshi and Rosenzweig run policy simulations and find formal insurance arrangements may increase rural-urban migration. Relatedly, in a new AJAE paper, Kazushi Takahashi, Chris Barrett, and Munenobu Ikegami study how the introduction of formal index insurance affects informal risk-sharing arrangements in rural Ethiopia. They find little evidence of a crowding out of informal insurance from formal insurance products.
Week of July 16, 2018
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.
Week of June 18, 2018
1. Migration: If you don't get the "edition" reference, I think I envy you. But I care, and in the absence of other specific ways to oppose cruelty and barbarism, I'll spend some time here sharing some useful information about migration. Such as the fact that the US has become a "low-migration" country. I think this is as significant a change to the nature of the country as the closing of the frontier, especially since so many people don't seem to realize how much migration, whether within the US or to the US from other countries, has dropped.
On to that other crucial fact about migration: it's very very good for the people migrating and doesn't harm the people who are already there. Here's the newly officially published in AER paper by Clemens, Lewis and Postel studying the effect of the end of the Bracero program which led to 1/2 a million Mexican workers leaving the country, without any detectable benefits for native workers (employers simply invested in labor-replacing technology it appears). Here's a new NBER paper on the forced migration of Poles after World War II finding that migrants invested more in human capital for three generations. That's consistent with other work that shows long-term positive, sustained effects for people who move, even those who don't have full choice. Here's a story about how migrants fleeing the US to Canada are finding employment and thriving.
If you're interested in the big picture on global migration, the 2018 OECD International Migration Outlook is out.
2. Banking: I talk a lot about the overlaps between US and global financial inclusion issues--from household finance to consumer protection to business models to regulation. So I think both of these next two items are relevant well-beyond the countries they are focused on.
First, here's New America with a new report on how local and community banks systematically charge people-of-color more for their accounts (here's the OpEd version), which doesn't exactly encourage these historically excluded populations to join the banking mainstream. Oh, and the consumer protection regulatory system is being undermined in more ways than you might realize. Not only is there direct deregulation, but recently the Supreme Court ruled that the way the SEC carries out many of its "trials" for investment fraud are unconstitutional--and the CFPB is too. Here's Arjan Schutte writing about being fired from the CFPB's consumer advisory board which, y'know, at least he's not being unconstitutional now.
On the other hand, in India, the RBI is working to turn urban cooperative banks into "small finance banks." This piece explains a bit about the history of Indian urban cooperative banks and the regulatory issues involved--it's not all good. It's worth reading for anyone thinking about productive ways forward for more inclusive banking systems.
3. Digital Finance: In most of the countries where digital financial services have made inroads among poor households, agents are playing a big role. But those agents are often basically the same folks we see running microenterprises that we can't figure out how to improve. And that probably means that their growth is being limited by the quality of services offered and decisions made by those agents.
Week of June 11, 2018
1. Household Finance: If you'll bear with me I'm going to write about household finance mostly with links to pieces about corporate finance. Corporate finance matters a lot, and it deserves the attention and resources invested in it (Channeling Willie Sutton: why do you write papers about corporate finance? Because that's where the money is). After several hundred years of lots and lots of resources and attention we've pretty much got this thing licked right? Well, maybe not the biggest questions but at least the basic questions like accounting and financial reporting, right? Right?
Here's Warren Buffet complaining about Generally Accepted Accounting (GAAP) rules being applied to his company. And here's an argument from several business school professors that GAAP rules aren't meaningful given changes in the economy--with the enticing tidbit that in many companies having a CPA, in other words having deep familiarity with the rules of corporate finance and accounting, is a disqualification for a senior-level job in the finance department. And here's Buffet again, this time with Jamie Dimon, arguing that quarterly financial reporting is broken.
Lest you think that this is some emerging consensus, here's Felix Salmon arguing they are wrong. Here's Matt Levine arguing they're wrong. And here (via Justin Fox, which we'll return to later) is a whole book about GAAP rules being wrong for entirely different reasons.
So all of this is interesting (OK, maybe not) but what does it have to do with household finance? We haven't even begun investing the kind of resources necessary to really understand household finance, but we act like we have all the important questions licked. Or at least that households should be able to, with a little financial literacy training perhaps, be able to get a grasp on their finances and make consistently sound decisions. The fact is, for the most part, we just don't know what we're talking about when we talk about household finance. Or loss aversion.
2. Digital Finance: In another brief diversion to start off an item, an astute reader pointed out that the way I had been writing about Findex made it seem like the Findex team did not have it's own report on the findings. They do, so click on it.
One read of the both the Global Findex team's report and the CFI report highlighted last week is that the promise of digital finance is largely unfulfilled. But there's still a lot of excitement over the promise in places like Egypt apparently. I found this piece particularly remarkable because I stumbled on it right after reading through the Findex analyses, and all I could think was "I don't think that data means what you think it means." Oh, and the note that moving to digital finance would allow the government to closely inspect everyone's spending habits, wheeee!
There's a different sort of excitement over digital finance in Uganda apparently where the parliament has approved taxing mobile money and social media(?!?). Apparently there was some concern that such taxes would be regressive, but some MPs objected that people shouldn't be exempted from paying taxes just because they were poor. Clearly those people don't read CGD/Vox.
In other CGD news related to digital finance, here's a piece about using blockchain in development projects--or perhaps more on point, *not* using the blockchain for development projects. There's a terrific decision tree graphic in the piece that is worth the click on its own, even though I disagree substantially with one part of it.
3. Firms, Productivity and Labor: Earlier this week I attended two days of the Innovation Growth Lab conference put on by Nesta. A number of interesting papers and research proposals were presented--the session I found most interesting was on the global productivity slowdown...
Week of June 4, 2018
1. Financial Inclusion: I have no idea what your priors are about financial inclusion, but I think it still matters a lot and you'll be seeing more about that from me in the faiV and elsewhere in coming months. The best way to update your priors on the state of financial inclusion is the Global Findex of course. I've been including things in drips and drabs, but Sonja Kelly and Beth Rhyne of CFI have now published their reasonably comprehensive look at the data, complete with lots of charts, available for everyone (and Sonja definitely deserves a vacation after all her work on this and the Gallup data).
CFI is certainly onboard with the theme of updating priors. The title of the report is "Financial Inclusion Hype vs. Reality" and the Introduction invites you to "Recalibrate." The big message is that despite growth in account ownership, there's no growth in usage and lots of troubling signs, like falling savings rates. You can feel the exasperation in the report, an exasperation that I generally share, given what seems to be a general fatigue around financial inclusion. These data don't in any way support the idea that it's time to move on from financial inclusion. But I'm less concerned than Sonja and Beth about the growing gap between access and usage. Consumer banking does have network effects--value of usage increases rapidly with the number of other users--but those effects take time. The population being served was never likely to be heavy users, which increases the time before network effects surface and become self-reinforcing. So it makes sense to me that as we get better at access, the gap between access and usage should grow for a while.
One place I'm not updating my priors based on this data is showcased in their Figure 6, illustrating that rapid growth in digital payments is not showing up in borrowing or savings. I've always been puzzled by the idea that making it easier for people to spend was going to boost savings.
Given that the empirics in Findex aren't very encouraging on progress in financial inclusion, here's a new paper from Besley, Burchardi and Ghatak laying out the benefits of inclusion. The most interesting thing about it is how well it aligns with what we've been seeing on general equilibrium effects of microcredit--it raises wages for the average worker. That's bad for impact evaluations, but good for more people and a powerful reason to continue investing in inclusion.
2. US Inequality: Speaking of average workers, a big reason for this week's theme is the new BLS numbers on contingent work that set the US Economy commentariat aflame yesterday. The big story is that contingent work--which includes freelancers, gig workers, temps, etc.--has not increased since 2005, the last time it was measured (here's a 2 minute overview). That's pretty remarkable since none of the gig platforms we hear so much about today existed back then. But the numbers are hard to interpret. Ben Casselman has a good overview of the issues here, chief among them being that the BLS asks about "primary" job and counts as non-contingent any regular job regardless of how steady the hours are. So the "no growth" data is consistent with findings from the SHED that 30 percent of Americans now rely on contingent work to make ends meet and from JP Morgan Chase Institute that gig work accounts for about 30% of income for those that do participate.
The bottom line: whatever your priors were, you should probably hold them more weakly than before.
But if you were looking forward to actually updating your priors, here's something I found surprising: income inequality in the US stopped growing some time ago (though the conclusions in that piece beg the question, in the logic sense of that term). And here's a paper from late last year that finds that what can be reasonably thought of as "freelance" professionals--doctors, accountants, lawyers--are responsible for most of the growth in income inequality since 2000.
3. Our Digital Overlords: Another inspiration for this week's theme was this piece by David Leonhardt, reviewing Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, a new book that considers the benefits of a data-rich markets for consumers, and the danger that data-rich markets lead to monopolies and less employment. But the thing that most caught my eye, in terms of updating priors, is a casual reference to the story of the Kerala fishermen benefiting from cell phones. That's a story that is very much in doubt, but seemingly few people have updated their priors (see also this). As a side note, if anyone knows of more current research on the story or an effort to sort through the claims (beyond what is in the comments on that piece), please let me know. But searching for that link on the Kerala story, I noticed several other stories on the ICTworks site about surprising failures of digital tools to improve market functioning. My eye was specifically drawn to a story I remember blogging about at least a decade ago: sharing market prices with African farmers via text messaging didn't work out nearly as well as it seemed it would.
My bottom line here is influenced by two studies about police bodycams that were released this week, one in Milwaukee and one in Spokane, which seem to have found opposite effects on a major outcome measure (the number of self-initiated stops police make) without having much other effects. That bottom line is I shouldn't make predictions about how technology will change behavior, or even have strong beliefs after reading a paper about such things.
First Week of June 2018
1. Microfinance: There are things that make you feel old. Like discovering that KGFS, the Indian "wealth management for the poor" not-a-start-up-anymore is 10 years old. Here's Bindu Ananth's, one of the co-founders, reflections on what they've learned over those 10 years. There's apparently a Field and Pande impact evaluation on its way shortly, which will be must reading. I'm struck by a couple of points in Bindu's post: a) that their take-up rates are so high that they are seeing general equilibrium effects (further cementing for me that GE effects and household risk are the two most important things to be thinking about in microfinance, and financial inclusion more broadly, right now), and b) the attention paid to the behavior and bandwidth of front-line staff (OK, three most important things).
But there are other things to think about too--here's MicroSave's latest Low Income Living newsletter focused on microfinance and WASH.
2. Global Development: For as long as I've been paying attention to Global Development there have been big think pieces and agendas for transforming aid. Right behind me are some of the first books I was handed way back then: Inside Foreign Aid, A Bed for the Night, Lords of Poverty. Here's Jeremy Konyndyk of CGD's review of the reform agenda of the past decades, why they haven't worked, and the pros and cons of what's happening now. Since he's focused on incentives, of course I liked it. Here's Paul Currion's paper on Network Humanitarianism for ODI, which he calls the "other half" of Jeremy's paper.
But that's macro stuff. Micro matters too and any discussion of the macro has to make sense in light of micro-realities. Here's Helen Epstein's review of a new book about Rwanda, titled In Praise of Blood. Marc Gunther recently paid a visit to Rwanda--here's his initial reflections including a discussion with Josh Ruxin, the founder of the Kigali restaurant/hotel Heaven and author of a very different book about Rwanda, from 2013. Realizing that was only 5 years ago makes me feel almost as old as learning KGFS is 10. Marc promises a good bit of reporting on his visit in the weeks to come.
And here's a Nature story on the many trials of unconditional cash transfers that are one of the macro-trends that Konyndyk writes about.
3. Household Finance (and Data Redux): Or perhaps I should have called this item financial inclusion or even financial health. Hot on the heels of Findex, Gallup has a 10 country survey of households, sponsored by MetLife Foundation, called the Global Financial Health Study. It's a really interesting set of data on how households feel about their finances. You can get to the reports and the data via this page in a multi-step process which I'm sure Ideas42 had nothing to do with designing.
Here are Sonja Kelly of CFI and Evelyn Stark of MetLife's take on the results. I'm not a huge fan of the "financial health" terminology--though that's a story for another time--but I am a huge fan of the way Sonja and Evelyn take on the difficulties of all the different phrases we use--financial health, financial inclusion, financial access, etc. All of our terminology fails at some level to capture what we are really after, and so we need a combination of metrics and methodologies to make sure we don't lose our way (such as how the focus on measuring financial inclusion led to paying too much attention to account openings).
I also promised to pass along things that I found around Findex, and here are two that both focus on the problem that Sonja and Evelyn write about: access does not necessarily lead to usage which does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes.
Week of May 21, 2018
1. Banking: Coinbase, a cryptocurrency trading platform, is doing something strange: acting a lot like a traditional bank by emphasizing its stability and trustworthiness. As Matt Levine points out (save that link, it's going to come up again later), this is the central paradox of cryptocurrencies--they supposedly do away with the need for trust, but most everyone needs a trusted intermediary to keep hold of their cryptocurrency and protect them against fraud. Y'know the sort of things that banks or governments do (or enable and enforce with regulation). You've probably heard the mantra that cryptocurrencies aren't that important but blockchain is. The Coinbase approach, which is apparently successful, puts the lie to that notion. Why do you need an expensive and inefficient distributed ledger when you can have a cheap and efficient one provided by a trusted intermediary, like Coinbase?
Trusted intermediaries are really important and the reason why it's worth caring about financial sector deepening. Rather than being distracted by cryptocurrencies, and their inevitable march toward realizing the need for trusted intermediaries, a more fruitful line of thinking is paying attention to what trusted intermediaries are emerging and how they affect consumers, transactions and the flow of money. This was a big part of the story of MFIs success, and one which I think remains underappreciated. Telecoms providing mobile money platforms is a really interesting case, of course. So are the commerce platforms that are rapidly becoming (or already are) payment platforms: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba. And so stories like this about Amazon and this Planet Money story about Tencent and Alibaba (it's called "A Series of Mysterious Packages," how can you resist?) may not seem like they are about banking, but they are about banking.
Beyond the obvious, the reason that the emergence of non-bank but sort-of-like-a-bank trusted intermediaries is that they change the structure of the market. Here's a new paper from de Quidt, Fetzer and Ghatak on market structure and borrower welfare in microfinance, arguing that competition can yield borrower outcomes that match non-profit lending. I'm not yet convinced. And yet, the NY Times Upshot new "Marx Ratio" determines that banks are socialist collectives (that's the Matt Levine link again, I really really wish I could link to specific parts of his posts).
Speaking of market structure, here's a story about American Samoa creating the first public bank in the United States since the turn of last century. Why? I suppose you could say the lack of competition was hurting borrower welfare.
2. Digital Finance: Here's a paper on how using social pressure to encourage positive health behaviors that every MFI that uses groups in any way should read, whether they are doing anything digital or not. There's a U-shape to the curve: the most influential people in changing behavior are those that are neither too close nor too distant in the social graph.
MicroSave has a new piece that gets helpfully specific on the opportunities for using digital finance to close the inclusion gap in six Asian countries (Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal and Vietnam). There are also country specific reports for most of the countries. Here's something similar from the IFC on Africa. And here's something similar from IIF with a focus on data rather than delivery.
Here is Felix Salmon's interview of the last remaining founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks in the United States, as he prepares to exit. It's mostly a discussion of why it's so hard to be a good bank, while complying with regulations designed to ensure that banks remain trusted intermediaries. Here's a recent announcement from Simple about their Emergency Savings tool which promises to help people figure out the right amount of emergency savings. I'm really curious about how they are really doing that, but the company hasn't responded to my questions.
Week of May 7, 2018
1. Self-Referential Metadata: Last week's faiV included a link to an app to automatically extract data from charts. I joked it would be the most clicked link in the history of the faiV and it certainly was the most clicked link of the week, more than doubling the clicks on any other link. It was also the most clicked of the last few months. Second place was a review of The Financial Diaries, that unfortunately I suspect many people couldn't read more than the first page of (honestly, it's great, but it's not $45 for 24 hours great. And does anyone ever pay that? Why?).
In other faiV news, Gisella Kagy got in touch to let me know the link to her paper about differential profits by gender for Ghanaian tailors was the right one; and I ran into Leora Klapper who let me know that she forwards the faiV to many colleagues each week. And yes, both of those are really just an excuse to say writing the faiV often feels like shouting into the void. So if you do see stuff you like, or just appreciate the faiV generally, please do get in touch every now and then to let me know. And it's also OK to let me know when I'm getting too niche, too snarky, or you have something you think should be featured in the faiV.
2. US Inequality: It was at the Dignity and Debt Network inaugural meeting that I ran into Leora, and a bunch of other researchers working on household finance, debt and related matters. It was a sociology conference so I had to get used to a format that wasn't paper-centric, but, of course, my bias is to noticing papers. A particularly interesting one was by Barbara Kiviat and Rourke O'Brien finding that low credit scores lower the likelihood of a job offer for a female applicant and lowers the offered salary to black applicants.
One wonders how such biases play out in the gig economy. Here's a piece on the growing use of 1-day gigs by restaurants and retail. It's practices like that which can make a job guarantee emotionally appealing. Here's Annie Lowrey on the growing momentum behind (very very) vague proposals for a jobs guarantee among Democrat candidates.
3. Rotten Kin: I'm going to use that as a very tenuous jumping off point to rotten kin as a factor that I don't think gets enough attention in the political economy of job guarantees and universal basic income. At least I hear often about discrimination and racism as explanations for why people would oppose such policies (leaving aside disputes about the basic economics). But I think almost everyone has a cousin or uncle or sibling that they think it would be bad for to get a cash stipend or would abuse a job guarantee in some way. I think that plays a big part in people's skepticism, even if they don't voice it publicly because it's not a nice thing to say about your family.
Anyway, here's Munir Squires writing in VoxDev about "kinship taxes" on Kenyan firm growth finding a fifth of women and a third of men would be willing to pay, and pay a lot, to hide income from their networks. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Think also of the ways that husbands and wives buy certain goods to protect income from each other. And then think about the rotten kin tax that Indian textile firms are paying based on Bloom, Mahajan McKenzie and Roberts' work--obviously that tax is less than the perceived tax paid if you hire non-relations as managers, but still.
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.
