1. Microfinance/Household Finance: I mentioned the Hrishipara Financial Diaries last week--it's a project Stuart Rutherford has been running in central Bangladesh for four years now. That's a truly unique data set of high frequency data on the financial lives of households. I also mentioned that Stuart is now funding the continuation of the diaries out of his own pocket. Don't make me beg for someone to step in with more funding so this dataset gets even more valuable. It's incredibly cheap by the way---hmm, maybe the first faiV GoFundMe? See, don't make me resort to such things!
Continuing in the wave of revisiting ideas about microfinance and it's impact, Bruce Wydick has "3 reasons the impact of microcredit might be bigger than we thought." Of course, the "we" in that sentence matters a lot. Mushfiq Mubarak and Vikas Dimble have a short review of microfinance research with handy links to the research we talk about most these days: evidence for ways that microfinance could innovate to increase impact. Of course, I have to return to the binding constraint on microfinance innovation: funding appropriate for investment in innovation.
2. Replication: I know what you're thinking: "Hey, I haven't heard about Worm Wars in a long time. What happened?" And so, let me bring you a new paper from Owen Ozier that reviews the history of the Worm Wars in an effort to understand the state of reproducibility in Economics and related topics. Here is Owen's Twitter thread with some "wild things" he learned working on the paper. And here's Annette Brown's replies (one, two, three) pointing out some longstanding errors in the literature on replication in economics--one lesson is that if you don't read the variable definitions you're likely to draw the wrong conclusions and others won't be able to replicate your work.
Here is an interesting argument that theory constrains degrees of researcher freedom more than experiment--that in fact one of the sources of the replication crisis is a lack of theoretical frameworks around empirical research. Oh, and that empirical work needs more formal mathematical models. In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is coming from the perspective of "behavioral sciences" which apparently does not include economics, where alot of recent argument has been about the need for experiments to constrain degrees of freedom and that "mathiness" is a problem. And here's Dorothy Bishop on "reining in the four horsemen of irreproducibility".
Inherent variability is not one of those four horsemen, but it is a plausible source of irreproducibility that has nothing to do with bad practices or researcher misbehavior. If reactions to stimuli vary a lot based on minor contextual factors (which is in fact one of the findings of behavioral sciences, albeit one that is itself subject to lots of questions about replication), then you should expect that the exact same experiment conducted at a different time and place with different subjects will yield different results. Whether that's the case is the subject of this debate between Simmons/Simonsohn, McShane/Bockenholt/Hansen (not that one), and Judd and Kenney (also not that one), all hosted by Andrew Gelman. It's worth the time to read through.
3. Research and Communications: Taking that conversation as a leaping off point, here's a new paper on demand effects in survey experiments. On the one hand, it may come as a relief to know that the paper doesn't find much evidence of experimenter demand effects. On the other hand, a lot of economics lab experiments are built on the idea that the experimenter can induce people to behave in certain ways with incentives--and when those incentives don't work, it's evidence of some other important factor operating. But, "Even financial incentives to respond in line with researcher expectations fail to consistently induce demand effects." I feel like this paper could not have been published in an economics journal, because the theory constraints (I'm particularly proud of this callback).
Week of April 26, 2019
1. Household Finance: I'm as surprised as anyone that this piece I wrote on the waste of time and money that is mandatory financial literacy classes in the Washington Post seems to be getting as much traction as it is. It's the closest I've ever come to going viral on Twitter (if you want to, here's the tweet just ready and waiting for you to retweet and further drive up those numbers). The comments, by the way, are about what you would expect--and further evidence for Morgan Housel's "you have to live it to believe it" thesis on perspectives of finance. I'm not the only one banging the drum against financial literacy classes: here's Jen Tescher of CFSI imploring banks to stop funding finlit classes and focus on tools that actually help customers.
One of the likely reasons (but certainly not the only one!) that finlit makes such little difference is the mismatch between what is taught and the actual financial lives of most households. Take for instance figuring out income taxes in the new economy. Most people in the US got a tax cut in 2018 but most of those think their taxes actually went up, because the connection between taxes and paychecks is so damned complicated in the US. And trying to figure it out if you're a contractor rather than an employee...
There is something worse than legislators mandating financial literacy. Intuit engaged in shockingly (even for cynical me) deceptive behavior by tricking people into using their paid product rather than the free product that they were eligible for--even going so far as to make sure that search engines didn't index the web page to use their regulatorily mandated free file service so it was for all intents and purposes invisible. No amount of financial literacy is going to fix that. If you were thinking that this sort of behavior was exactly why the CFPB was created you would be right, but since Mick Mulvaney has destroyed the agency, don't expect any meaningful action against Intuit.
This isn't just a US problem. This sort of thing--hiding the information customers need to make good financial decisions--happens everywhere. Think of the changes in transparency of pricing of M-Pesa. Or this audit study by Xavi Gine and Rafe Mazer finding bank personnel in Ghana, Mexico and Peru don't tell customers about the best account for them (the customers that is). This seems like the right time to bang on one of my pet drums: middle-income countries, look to the US to the see the future of your financial system and tremble.
Looking from the other side, the US has a lot to learn from international contexts about how households manage volatile financial lives. Stuart Rutherford has a fantastic write-up of the 3 years of ups-and-downs and coping strategies of a family in the Hrishapara Financial Diaries. Stop what you're doing and read it. But let me also call-out that Stuart is now funding the Hrishipara diaries out of his own pocket. Any funder who is reading this: send Stuart some money to keep up this remarkable work. Please.
My friends at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program have a new report on short-term financial stability and how important it is for any larger goals, based on the work of a number of organizations focused on the issue (NB: I'm a senior fellow of Aspen FSP and was involved in the early discussions that led to this report). Before you international folks keep scrolling...there is a lot of overlap between the insights here and the situation in middle-income and developing countries. And you could easily frame it in the same way that most on the international scene do: the importance of building resilience to shocks.
2. Financial Inclusion: I'm one of the retrogrades who refuses to give up on the term "financial inclusion" (while acknowledging the points made by advocates of "financial security" and "financial health"). Speaking of retrogrades, Matthew Soursourian at CGAP is even more retrograde than I am, making an argument that "access" is important and we shouldn't fetishize "usage." One of the reasons is that usage may be harmful--and Greta Bull argues that we need to talk about that, particularly around credit. Over at Next Billion, Graham Wright of MSC (formerly MicroSave--apparently I'm also retrograde in not changing FAI's name), has some speculation on the next 20 years in financial inclusion (which I take as explicit endorsement for "inclusion" whether Graham meant it or not). One of his key points is on the issue of consumer protection, which in addition to dovetailing with Greta's post, allows me to point out that in every other domain the word "inclusion" means fair and equitable participation and so we should make that part of the defacto definition of financial inclusion. Drawing things fully back to Matthew's post, the one thing I think he misses in the argument for access is network effects. The value of an account has a lot to do with who else has and uses accounts and we should expect usage to trail substantially behind access especially when less than, say, 60% of people have accounts.
Two quick hits on China and financial inclusion: Here's a piece that argues that China's "social credit score" is less coherent and more complex than it is usually portrayed. But then at the Avengers:End Game premiere, one of the trailers was a public shaming of delinquent debtors. I don't know if that's confirmatory or contradictory evidence.
Finally, there is a lot to learn from the history of financial systems and the way they include and exclude. Rebecca Spang reviews a new book (The Promise and Peril of Credit--which would have been a great title for Greta's post--by Francesca Trivellato) about the development of financial instruments in Europe and anti- and philo-semitism and how it shaped economies.
Week of April 12, 2019
1. Arbitrary and Biased: I feel like "arbitrary and biased" should have been the tagline for the faiV but it'll have to do as just the name this week's edition (I won't make the obvious joke). The reference here specifically is an update to my post at CGAP on impact evaluations and systematic reviews of financial inclusion interventions. Duvendack and Mader, authors of a systematic review of reviews that I've mentioned in the faiV and in that post, responded. And then I responded to them. The short version, if you don't want to click on all those links or do a lot of scrolling, is that we disagree substantially (though in good faith!) and particularly on the issues of arbitrariness and bias. My perspective on these issues have been substantially influenced by Deaton's and Pritchett's critiques of RCTs, which feels a bit ironic. Systematic reviews are useful, but they are no less arbitrary nor less biased than other attempts to synthesize the literature--they're just arbitrary and biased in different ways, albeit generally more transparent ways (though what we know about how disclosure affects people's trust leaves a question about the benefits of that disclosure).
Reveling in the arbitrarily biased essential nature of the research enterprise, here are a couple of papers that raise different questions about how the literature on microcredit may be biased. Bedecarrats, Guerin, Morvant-Roux and Roubaudreplicate the Al-Amana microcredit impact study and find errors and issues with the data and code--though exactly how much it matters to the big picture conclusion isn't clear. Meanwhile Dahal and Fiala review the microcredit RCTs focusing on whether they have sufficient power to detect likely magnitude of effects (and find that they aren't) and find significant and meaningful effects on profits when the data is pooled. I need to read both these papers more closely, but they are interesting enough that I didn't want to wait before including them in the faiV.
2. Evidence-Based Policy/Methods: Speaking of arbitrarily biased research, the 5% statistical significance threshold is perhaps the most influential arbitrarily biased feature of modern academic research. Some people are trying to change that--well more than 800 who signed onto a letter in Nature protesting the cutoff. Before you come to a conclusion on whether that letter will make a difference, I must note, as many on Twitter did, that it's not a statistically significant portion of scientists who have signed on.
Another arbitrary bias, according to Nick Lea, deputy chief economist at DfID, is the need to run regressions in economics papers. David Evans, now ensconced at CGD, responds with a defense of regressions and some ideas on how development economics can be better.
Here's a reminder that "purely evidence-based policy doesn't exist" though I'm not sure how many people thought it did. And here's a reminder from Straight Talk on Evidence that short-term impact often fades out, something evidence-based policy really needs to take into account.
And finally, here's an interesting piece from mathemetician Aubrey Clayton adjudicating a long-running dispute between Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb over probabilities, finding that Taleb "overplays his hand."
3. Household Finance: The mythology of Spanish colonialism in the Americas centered heavily on cities of gold (anybody remember this?). Here's a story about the reverse--Dominicans searching Spain (and Switzerland) for lost troves of gold. It's all a scam of course, of the sort immediately recognizable by anyone who has spent time in Latin America. It's a fascinating read because of how the story delves into the psychology that has led so many Dominicans to believe (and continue to believe) an ancestor secreted billions of dollars of gold in Spanish and Swiss banks that they stood to inherit--to the point that they quit jobs and made all sorts of other bad financial decisions. When there is little hope, believing that slow, steady abstemious frugality will matter may seem as much magical thinking as hidden inheritances. Here's a piece from Morgan Housel on how much our (macro)financial experiences affect our later decision making.
Week of April 5, 2019
1. Financial Inclusion: It's an "interesting" time in the world of financial inclusion, in the sense of that (apocryphal?) Chinese curse. There are arguments on whether to change the name of the "sector" accurately reflects the goals, the funding environment is uncertain, digital financial services are shifting business models and regulatory frameworks--all also indications that there is important convergence between "developed" and "developing" countries. But most importantly there are questions about whether the results from the work of the last 40 years (a rough approximation of the modern microfinance movement globally, and the asset-building movement in the US) justify further investment.
You can see the tensions in two recent posts at Next Billion: first, Leora Klapper on the importance of investment in financial inclusion to meet the SDGs; and a fiery response from Phil Mader and Maren Duvendack, authors of the Campbell Collaborative/3ie "systematic review of reviews" that I've likely mentioned a couple of times. But the "interesting" times also explain, at least in part, the raft of other evidence reviews of various sorts that are appearing (IPA, Dvara, UNCDF/BFA,Caribou Digital, CGAP). It's enough to get you to buy into Lant Pritchett's dictum that RCTs are "weapons against the weak."
CGAP asked me to write something about all this--and to do it in under 1000 words. You can guess how well that went, given that the summary for the evidence review I've been working on for CDC is more than 10 pages (you should also read that as an acknowledgement of a specific conflict of interest when it comes to talking about evidence reviews). Anyway, the final result is here. The bottom line is that I'm skeptical of what can be learned from systematic reviews--channeling some other Pritchett-thought on where policy-relevant insights come from.
By the way, if you're skeptical of the point about most interventions struggling to show meaningful impact, here's a new paper making the case that TB public health interventions in the early 20th century had little to do with declining TB-mortality; and here's a paper from the education sector so frustrated that they can't find evidence of impact that they propose doing away with credible large-scale impact evaluations. And here's an open letter to a hypothetical education minister with some useful statistics on how little learning happens in schools in most of the world.
2. Global Productivity: Plenty has been written about stagnant wages, slow growth, and rising inequality in developed countries (if you're based in the US, it might not be apparent that this is a global phenomenon, but it is.) But there's another important phenomenon that hasn't penetrated the popular consciousness nearly as much, probably because the impact isn't as immediately apparent: there's a global productivity slowdown. That's a problem because rising incomes come from growth, and growth comes from productivity gains.
Here's a new paper from Gordon and Sayed documenting the trans-Atlantic trend in slowing productivity, and how closely European productivity growth (or lack thereof) has mirrored that of the US, with a time lag. Their thesis is that the slowdown is related to a "retardation in technical change."
That probably sounds odd given that I know about the paper and you are reading about the paper on using technologies that were essentially unfathomable in 1980. But overall economic dynamism, including technical change has actually slowed dramatically since the post-war years. And there's emerging evidence that there is a single cause for all of these issues: the aging of the population.
It's a fascinating thesis that makes a lot of intuitive sense, and there is growing evidence for it from lots of different directions. I'm sure there will be lots more papers on this in the years ahead, but in the meantime it suggests a few interesting thoughts: a) China has a big problem coming, and b) future productivity growth is going to come from India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and c) we all have legitimate reasons to worry about millennials not having sex.
Week of March 22, 2019
1. Social Investment: You've of course seen many stories about the US college admissions bribery scandal. And if you pay any attention to the world of impact investment you likely have seen that Bill McGlashan, the very public face of one of the world's largest impact investment funds, was one of the people arrested for participating in the scheme. Anand Giridharadas, who has become the very public face of criticism of modern philanthropy and social investment, discusses why McGlashan is "the most important fish" in the story. Here's the Twitter thread versionif you prefer that over a 4 minute video.
Trevor Neilson, co-founder of the Global Philanthropy Group, says that McGlashan's behavior should not be seen as a reflection on impact investing as a whole, because...well apparently because he wrote a Medium post saying that it shouldn't. There's really no argument there other than "Our goals are too important to be worried about means!" if you consider that an argument. Here's Jed Emerson, who may have an argument, but I just don't understand what is happening in this piece. Lauren Cochran, managing director of an impact investing firm, actually has a few arguments attempting to make the same point, including that McGlashan himself was a figurehead chosen to attract investors, but who wasn't involved in actual investment decisions.
She has a nice line about Giridharadas: "using one man’s ethical failings to grab the mic is characteristically self-serving, but as usual, he forgot that there might be a baby in the bath water." It's catchy but wrong. Giridharadas whole point is that there may be a baby in the bath water, but the bathwater is toxic and everyone will be better off, even the baby, if you toss the whole thing. Moreover, the fund that Cochran administers uses this language: "dual expectation of best-in-class financial returns and maximum positive social and environmental impact." And that, to me, is a big part of the toxic nature of the current impact investment environment. On reflection, that statement illuminates what is really happening in Neilson's piece--the fear that if the myth of "no tradeoffs" is exposed then the money will dry up.
To be clear, I'm not in Giridhradas' camp but I certainly appreciate how his perspective keeps putting the "no tradeoffs" crowd on the defensive, and illustrates the inconsistency if not hypocrisy hidden there.
Kristin Gillis Moyer of Mulago points to a terrific example of the inherent tension: the new Catalytic Capital Consortium funded by MacArthur, Rockefeller and Omidyar. It aims to invest in businesses with low profit potential and/or high risk. I find it an incredibly refreshing approach--it explicitly acknowledges that the no tradeoff myth is leaving many social enterprises in the lurch. But as Gillis Moyer points out, it's not clear how catalytic it can be since there are unlikely to be that many other investors chomping at the bit to invest in low-profit, risky businesses. I'd like to think the catalytic part will be creating space for more funds and investors to say that they prioritize impact over financial returns, and that's OK.
2. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Because the faiV was so full I'd been holding on to a few things on this topic, and events have made them all the more relevant. Platforms for open sharing seemed like such a good idea for a long time. But the cost of open sharing is so so much higher than most anticipated. Not only does it enable evil, but attempting to stop evil exacts a huge toll on human beings. This is a story about the Facebook contractors whose job it is to stop the New Zealand murderer's live stream. And a Twitter thread from someone in a similar position at Google. I'm guessing many of those folks are inching toward Calvinism.
Evgeny Morozov has a different take on the costs that open platforms and big tech exact, and why the global white nationalist movement has very different views on that front. It is a helpful reminder of the costs of the old system and the structures that the liberal order created to try to limit those costs, structures that seem to not work so well in this age, and are under attack from many directions. That's in part the theme of a new book reviewed by Noah Smith, The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. I haven't read the book but the review is certainly influencing my thinking on the above.
Oh, and Chinese firms are working on facial recognition of pigs, while US police forces are using bad data to train their facial recognition and other AI systems. Andwhat about "behavioral recognition"? Note that this has quite obvious connections to the use of psychometrics and other "alternative data" for creditworthiness evaluations.
3. Household Finance: There's a huge amount of new stuff here, so I'm going to be particularly eccentric this week. There's a lot more coming in the following weeks that will be more serious.
One of the questions that fascinates me these days is what is good financial advice for households that face a lot of income volatility. The foundation of virtually everything in the financial advice world is the lifecycle model--and we know that doesn't apply to a very large proportion of households. That doesn't stop the financial advice industry from thriving--but like so many other things, the internet has disrupted that world a great deal. And that disruption creates perverse incentives. Here's the story of the "Fall of America's Money Answers Man", a once-respectable financial advice columnist who turned into a con artist.
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 March 1, 2019
1. Economics: The dismal science doesn't often generate positive reviews from outside the discipline, so when it does happen it's worth noting. Julia Rohrer, who in addition to having one of the best titled blogs I've ever seen, is a psychology graduate student who procrastinated on her dissertation by attending a summer program in economics. Here is her list of things she appreciated in economics as a positive contrast to her experience in psychology.
On the other hand (hah!), economists typically have a lot to say about what is wrong with economics--certainly I encounter more "friendly-fire" in the econ literature than when I dip my toes in other disciplines (though this is perhaps my favorite example of the intra-disciplinary critique). There's an ongoing discussion about the future of economics going on in the Boston Review--I don't know if that counts as friendly-fire in terms of the outlet, but the participants are economists--starting with an essay by Naidu, Rodrik and Zucman, Economics after Neoliberalism. Then there are responses from Marshall Steinbaum, who notes that "every new generation proclaims itself to have discovered empirical verification for the first time," and from Alice Evans who focuses on the nexus of economics and political power in the form of unions.
But, because it's me writing this, I have to close on a new paper in JDE, that finds that communal land tenure explains half of the cross-country agricultural productivity gap. And here's a piece about how small teams of researchers are more innovative than large teams. generate much more innovation than big teams Neo-liberalism won't go down without a fight!
2. Migration: I haven't touched on migration for a while so it felt serendipitous that Michael Clemens and Satish Chand put out an update to their paper first released in 2008(!) on the effects of migration on human capital development in Fiji. The basic story is that in the late 80's formal discrimination against Indian-Fijians increased sharply, causing the community to both increase emigration and investment in human capital to aid emigration prospects. The net effect, rather than the dreaded "brain drain," was to increase the stock of human capital in Fiji. grapes
Cross-border migration is really the only option in Fiji, but in many countries, like Indonesia, there are lots of internal migration options. Since there is typically a large gap in productivity within countries as well as between countries, internal migrationhas always been a part of the development story. Bryan and Morten have a new article in VoxDev about this process in Indonesia, looking at the productivity gains possible from removing barriers to internal migration.
Since we started off talking about Economics, here's a post from David McKenzie considering the effects of migration on economists--or more specifically, how to think about job market papers about a candidate's country-of-origin. True to his style, David goes deep, including a model, and a survey. The post was inspired by a tweet from Pablo Albarcar who later noted it was mostly a joke about "brain drain" worries.
It is surprising to me how tenacious the brain drain idea is. When I have conversations about it, I try to cite the literature like Clemens and Chand, but I rarely find that makes a dent. People can always find an objection. So I've taken to just asking people how they feel about the "destruction" of Brazilian soccer/football culture and skill due to the mass emigration of the most skilled players. Typically, that leads to several moments of silent blinking. If you're interested here's a paper about "Rodar" the circular human capital investment, migration and development among Brazilian footballers.
3. US Poverty and Inequality: I typically try to avoid the grab-bag approach to items of interest but I'll confess this one is a bit of a grab bag with a variety of connecting threads. We'll start by connecting to a piece I included last week about tax refunds and saving. If you haven't read that, you should. I noted I was grateful for the piece because it meant I could skip the annual ritual of linking to a piece I wrote for SSIR several years ago about rethinking tax refunds. But I should have known that the zombie idea of tax refunds being bad personal finance wouldn't die so easily. Here's Neil Irwin from the NYT on how people being angry about lower refunds shows that "humans are not always rational." I'm struck by the irony that the continuing common use of "rational" in economics requires zero-cost attention, while a foundational truth of the discipline is "nothing is zero-cost." There is nothing irrational about paying a very small fee (in foregone interest) for the valuable service of helping you to save when other services are ineffective. That's especially true if you include, as you should, the cost of the tax advisors and financial advisors required to accurately calculate the proper amount of withholding and to choose the right investment/savings account in which to store those savings. So I guess that connects to the thread about economics maybe not being post-neoliberalism quite yet. And here's a column from the Washington Post's personal finance columnist withpush back on the "refunds are bad" idea from readers who explain their rational choices in their own words.
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 February 11, 2019
1. Our Algorithmic Overlords: I've long argued that teaching kids to code is as much of a waste of time as financial literacy. The simplified version of the argument is that most people are terrible programmers and computers are already better at coding than the average human. As a consequence I emphasize to my own kids and to others who are blinkered enough to ask my advice, that learning how to communicate/write is a much more important tool for the future (yes, yes, cognitive dissonance).
While I still think I'm right about the first part, it turns out I'm wrong about the second part. Yesterday OpenAI "released" work on an AI system that writes shockingly good text. I use scare quotes because, in another sign of things to come, OpenAI has only published a small subset of their work because they believe that the potential malicious use of the technology is great enough to restrict access. There are a bunch of news stories about this. Here's Wired, for instance. But the most interesting one I've come across is The Guardian because they had the algorithm write an article based on their lede.
Let's stick to the disturbing for a bit, because it's that kind of day. The World Food Program has formed a partnership with Palantir to analyse its data on food distributions, apparently with the main motivation being to look for "anomalies" that indicate that aid is being diverted or wasted. The idea of handing over data about some of the world's most vulnerable people to a private company that specializes in surveillance and tracking of people hasn't gone over well with a wide variety of people. As background, here's an article about what Palantir does for their biggest client, the NSA. Sometimes it seems like some people at the UN look at the one world government kooks and think, "What could we do to make their conspiracy theories more plausible?"
On a more theoretical level, Kleinberg, Ludwig, Mullainathan and Sunstein have a new paper on "Discrimination in the Age of Algorithms," arguing that despite fears of algorithmic discrimination, proving discrimination by algorithms is a lot easier than proving discrimination by humans. Of course, that requires putting regulations in place that allow algorithms to be examined. I'm going to flatter myself by pointing out it's similar to an argument I made in my review of Automating Inequality. So I feel validated.
Speaking of transparency, regulation and of algorithmic surveillance, here's David Siegel and Rob Reich arguing that it's not too late for social media to regulate itself, by setting up something like FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which polices securities firms). It's an argument that I would have given short-shrift to, but the FINRA example is credible.
Finally, I'll be dating myself in the Graphic of the Week below, but here's another way to figure out how old I am: when I was an undergrad, most of the "power imbalance" between developing countries and private firms literature was about GM. Here's a new piece from Michael Pisa at CGD on the new power imbalance and it's implications: the relationship between developing countries and tech giants.
2. Digital Finance: That feels like as reasonable a transition as I'm going to get to new data from Pew on the global spread of smartphones. Given limited consumer protections, regulatory and enforcement capability, and "digital literacy" in many developing countries, I will confess this worries me a lot, cf Chris Blattman's thread on "creating a 20th Century...system in an 18th Century state."
Here's a particular instance of that concern, tieing together the last few items: the rapidly growing use of "alternative credit scores" using things like digital footprints and psychometrics. You can make an argument that such things are huge boon to financial inclusion by tackling the thorny problem of asymmetric information. But there are big questions about what such alternative metrics are actually measuring. For instance, as the article above illustrates, the argument is that in lending, character matters and that psychometrics can effectively evaluate character. But it doesn't ask whether character is in-born or shaped by circumstance? No matter which way you answer that question, you're going to have a tough time arguing that discriminating based on character is fair. And that's all before we get to all the other possible dimensions of opaque discrimination.
The growing use of alternative data is starting to get attention from developed world regulatory agencies, but the first frontier of regulation is likely to be from securities regulators. I don't think they are going to be particularly interested in protecting developing world consumers. I guess that idea about self-regulation is starting to look more appealing, particularly if it's trans-national.
Meanwhile, the frontier of digital finance is advancing rapidly, even without alternative data. Safaricom introduced what is here called a "overdraft facility" in January, but I think of it more as a digital credit card. In the first month it was available, $620 million was borrowed. The pricing seems particularly difficult to parse but that may be just the reporting. One of the very first things I wrote for FAI was arguing for development of a micro-line-of-credit. Now that it's here, I confess it makes me very nervous.
3. Financial Inclusion: That's not to say that digital tools don't hold lots of promise for financial inclusion, just check the Findex. This week CGAP hosted a webinar with MIX on "What Makes a Fintech Inclusive?" There are some sophisticated answers to that question with some good examples, but I often return to the simplest answer: it cares about poor and marginalized people. And so I especially worry when I see answers to that question that lead with tech.
The financial inclusion field as a whole has been in something of a slow-moving existential crisis for the last few years. The best evidence of that is the number of efforts to define or map the impact of financial services and financial inclusion, several of which I'm a part of. Last week I linked to an IPA-led evidence review on financial inclusion and resilience. The week before that to a Cochrane Collaboration review of reviews of evidence on financial inclusion. This week, the UNCDF and BFA published their take on pathways for financial inclusion to impact the SDGs (full report here). I could say I expect there will be more, but I know there will be more in this vein, if I can finish revisions, etc.
Week of February 4, 2019
1. MicroDigitalHouseholdFinance:
I've had to cram what I usually break out into 2 categories into this first item. First, last week I featured a story about Kenyan MFIs being driven "to [an] early grave"and asked if any one had some additional knowledge of that situation. Thanks to David Ferrand (of FSDAfrica) and Alexandra Wall (of CEGA's Digital Credit Observatory), I'm reasonably confident that story is reasonably accurate (I do try to be good Bayesian). Meanwhile, with a broader perspective, Gregor Dorfleitner sent me a link to his recently published research looking at adoption of digital infrastructure by nearly 1000 MFIs globally. It's generally a more hopeful picture of evolution over disintermediation than what is happening in Kenya.
This week, coincidentally I had two conversations about household finances that revolved around individuals' willingness to hide their income from others in the household and that affects outcomes for good or ill. And then, up pops Fred Wherry and colleagues with a new paper on exactly on the mechanics intrahousehold bargaining around borrowing and lending based on research in California. I'm very impressed they avoided "Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." and I do kind of love "Awkwardness, Obfuscation and Negative Reciprocity." And in other new paper news, the titans of financial choice architecture, have a new paper on how use implicit defaults to spur people to make active choices--which seems a better form of nudging than much of what I see.
2. Banking (and Money Transfer Operators): I frequently talk about how financial system regulators in the developing world need to look to the US for a peek into their future. This week I learned that Australia is also a useful cautionary tale. Pretty much the entire banking sector in Australia is facing the prospect of criminal prosecutions after a wide ranging royal commission report that details rampant "fee for no service" practices were widespread.
Meanwhile there are some big changes happening in the global money transfer space, related to Chinese operators attempts to expand globally, and the Trump administrations general antipathy to such moves. Last year, Ant Financial tried to buy MoneyGram before regulators put a stop to the transaction. MoneyGram is now essentially moribund, having lost 83% of it's market value since then, and trying to sell itself to anyone who might have some cash. Ant Financial has moved on to a UK company, WorldFirst, which this week announced it was shutting down it's US operation so that American regulators have no say in the deal. Neither of those stories sound like the prospects for cutting the costs of global remittances are improving.
3. Global Inequality: Last week I purposely skipped over the ridiculous annual OxFam global wealth inequality brouhaha. Perhaps I should stick to my guns, but given the number of people I saw engaging with this Guardian piece from Jason Hickel, that somehow argues that global poverty hasn't been decreasing, and life was great in the 1820s, well...Here's pushback from Martin Ravallion. Here's Max Roser, who was a particular target in the Hickel op-ed.
Turning to doing something about global inequality rather than fantasies about the pastoral idylls of the 1820s, there's been a remarkable flourishing of pieces about tax avoidance by the wealthy. Here's the op-ed from the NYT that inspired the name of this week's edition on the Trump tax cuts enabling corporate tax dodging. Here's a new paper in the AER finding that globalization since 1994 has led to the labor income tax burden of the middle class rising, while that on the top 1 percent fell. Here's a new brief from Danny Yagan at SIEPR on how high earning wealthy entrepreneurs dodge taxes on labor income of about $1 trillion per year. And using data from Gabriel Zucman, here's a piece from the Washington Post on the new club of wealth inequality, with charter members China, Russia and the US.
