1. MicroDigitalFinance: Back before the holidays, I hosted the first faiVLive on how to think about microcredit impact based on recent evidence. If you missed it, you can watch it here (and people are still watching it, I'm happy to say). Here's Bruce Wydick's take on the proceedings if you prefer text to video.
Last week, there was some discussion of evidence gaps, and it's clear that I'm not the only one thinking in this direction. On the heels of that Campbell Collaborative review-of-reviews, IPA has a review of evidence (and gaps) on "Building Resilience through Financial Inclusion" that makes a lot more sense to me.
Okay, now to some less-meta items. Well only a little bit I guess. Remember that Karlan and Zinman paper about high-cost loans in South Africa that found positive effects? It was a lending for resilience story. Now there's a company in California offering high-cost loans to people via their landlords, specifically marketed to help them not miss a rent payment or to pay a security deposit. The article mostly ignores fungibility, presuming that the actual use of the loan proceeds are paying rent rather than covering some other emergency, but that seems unlikely to me. In the US Financial Diaries we saw that housing payments were much more erratic than other types of payments, though the data wasn't clean enough to really draw any firm conclusions. So is this a lending-for-resilience story or a new version of payday lending debt traps?
Speaking of payday lending debt traps, we usually use that phrase metaphorically. But there's a UK payday lender who is apparently eager to make it more literal. Yes, they are advocating for a return to debtors' prisons (darn that asymmetric information and moral hazard!). And even doubling down on the idea.
Finally, here's a story (HT Matthew Soursourian) about Kenyan MFIs being driven "to [an] early grave" as digital financial services allow commercial banks and non-banks to siphon off the customer base. Disintermediation was not exactly the story that early proponents of mobile money were hoping for, but it does fit with the historical record of financial systems development. If you know anything about this, or can vouch for the accuracy of the information in the article, I'd love to hear from you.
2. Global Development: I'm going to skip the on-going "shooting fish in a barrel" about OxFam's annual global wealth publicity/outrage stunt since there's nothing at all new there. Better to spend your limited attention on this NYTimes op-ed from Rohini Pande and colleagues on the "new home for extreme poverty."
If you follow these topics at all, you know that new home is middle-income countries like India. The Congress Party's proposal of a not-universal basic income to address the persistence of extreme poverty in the country has been getting a fair amount of attention. Apparently Angus Deaton and Thomas Piketty are advising Congress, though from my experience with politicians "advising" could mean "we read their books." Here's Maitreesh Ghatak's take on what it would take for the policy to work.
On the other side of the world, I've watched the evolving situation in Venezuela with a great deal of personal interest. I grew up in Colombia, a few hours from the Venezuelan border, and learned relatively recently that an ancestor of mine funded an invasion of Venezuela in the early 1800s. Particularly my interest has been caught by some economists volunteering to educate politicians and pop culture figures on what is going on, in the hopes of stopping bad takes. Here, by the way, courtesy of Chris Blattman, is a deeper background piece on the Maduro regime than you may find elsewhere. The macroeconomic quirks of access to gold reserves and of sovereign and not-so-sovereign bonds under sanctions have been pretty interesting too. And here's Cindy Huang of CGD on the potential for Colombia accessing concessional funding to help finance programs for Venezuelan refugees.
Finally, I'm happy to claim, without evidence, that my request for Rachel Glennerster to post her Twitter thread on what she's learned in her first year as DfID's chief economist as a blog post so that was easier to share, cite and archive caused this blog post compiling her Twitter thread.
3. Small Business: My fixation with breaking down the silo between financial inclusion in the US and internationally extends beyond household finance. The story of most small business in the US is the same as it is in developing countries--they are not high-growth "gung-ho" entrepreneurs but frustrated employees trying to generate an income in the face of labor market failures of various sorts. So the perennial development topic of how to increase lending to SMEs should be looking to the US, and those in the US should be looking internationally.
For most small and micro-businesses the biggest financial challenge isn't getting credit to invest, but managing cash flow and liquidity. Square, which has historically been focused on enabling retail consumer-to-business payments, recently announced a new product specifically to tackle this problem: a debit card that allows real-time access to balances. To put it in development-speak, Square is offering trade credit to small merchants to cover the trade credit they provide to customers. I'm super-interested in seeing how well it works.
Week of January 21, 2019
1. MicroDigitalFinance: Many of you will be familiar with the story of microcredit's rise and sort-of fall, and it's current state of--I don't know, existential angst? But if not, the story is ably told in a new Vox piece by Stephanie Wykstra, with some comments from Jonathan and I included. Not too long after that, the Campbell Collaborative and 3ie issued a "systematic review of reviews" of the impact of financial inclusion, led by Maren Duvendack. I have to say it's kind of weird. The one sentence conclusion is "Financial inclusion interventions have very small and inconsistent impacts." Which apart from appending an "s" to the perfectly plural "impact", I don't disagree with. But this format is a review of reviews which imposes some weird constraints. Ultimately only 11 of 32 identified studies were included, and only one of those was from an economics journal, two are earlier Campbell or 3ie publications, two are specifically only about women's empowerment, and three are about strangely specific topics like HIV prevention. So I'm left really uncertain what to think of it.
Of course, the hot topic isn't generic microfinance but digital finance. The Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa has an updated "evidence gap map" of research on the impact of digital finance featuring 55 studies (which is more than I have had the time to delve into so I can't compare it to the Campbell/3ie inclusion set). There's a summary of the findings at Next Billion.
Finally, here's an interesting story about Econet, the Zimbabwean mobile money provider--interesting in that it is really about the evolution of mobile money providers from following M-Pesa to following Tencent.
2. US Inequality: A big part of the story of understanding US inequality specifically, and inequality in developed countries in general, is understanding what has happened to wages of low-skill workers. The NYTimes has a piece on how cities have shifted from being the "land of opportunity" for such workers to a trap, based on work that David Autor presented in his Ely Lecture at the AEAs (by the way, AEA, it's still a good time to rename the Ely Lecture!).
One policy option for addressing stagnant wages for low-skill workers is to raise the minimum wage. Cengiz, Dube, Lindner and Zipperer continue their long-running work on the effects of 138 minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016. They find increased earnings and essentially no effect on number of low-wage jobs.
That's encouraging. Less encouraging is a new paper from Rodrik and di Tella finding that people are really, really happy to support protectionist policies, regardless of their politics, as a policy response to trade shocks.
3. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Speaking of people's attitudes, there's a big new report on Americans' attitudes on artificial intelligence from something called the Future of Humanity Institute, which as a name is somewhat creepy in my opinion. Maybe I've seen/read too much dystopian fiction. Anyway, they find that Facebook is the least trusted institution when it comes to AI development (no surprise) and the US military is tied for most trusted (big surprise, apparently these people haven't seen/read the same dystopian fiction I have). Also of interest, the median respondent thinks there's a 50% chance that robots will be able to fully replace human beings in less than 10 years. And just because, here's a Night Before Christmas style poem about the future of AI.
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.
