1. India: This year I resolved to make sure I was paying more attention to events in countries with large populations that aren't the United States, and not just treating them like an instance of a broader class. Given the elections in India, and the somewhat surprising strength of the BJP's performance, this seems like an opportune moment. Here's a Vox explainer on the elections for those of you who, like me, may have been only vaguely aware of the elections as a referendum on Modi vs. (Rahul) Gandhi. Here's an interesting essay on the most important feature of Indian politics not being the rivalry between parties but the generally uncontested move toward closing off civil liberties and a more authoritarian state. Here's 12 reasons why the BJP won, with perhaps the most interesting point being the BJP's efficiency at actually delivering welfare programs rather than just vague promises about future welfare programs. For those of you following along in the US or Australia, or any other country where right-wing populism has experienced a rebirth, there are clear parallels throughout. Here's Shamika Ravi on policy priorities for the new government (written before the election).
There is more than the election going on. So here's a couple of things that may be more of traditional interest to faiV readers. Demonetization was three years ago. Andeverything is back to where it was--maybe this should make programs with "null effects" feel better. And here's a fascinating study of the social lives of married women in Uttarakhand, with a particular emphasis on how "empowerment shocks" spread through social networks and decay over time.
2. Causality and Publishing Redux: A few things popped up related to last week's focus on causality. One point I touched on was spillovers and general equilibrium effects. Here's a note from Paddy Carter of CDC on the tension for DFIs attempting to invest in ways that are "transformative" (read, lots of spillover effects) and measuring their causal impact. I also noted JDE now accepting papers based on per-analysis plans. Pre-registration isn't going so well in psychology where a new study looked at 27 preregistered plans and the ultimate papers and found all of them deviated from the plan, and only one of those noted the change. Brian Nosek's money quote: "preregistration is a skill and not a bureaucratic process." Which could serve as a theme of Berk Ozler's discussion of using pre-registration to boost the credibility of results, not just for an experiment. Very useful for those interested in developing the pre-registration skill.
This may be stretching it a bit, but Raj Chetty's incipient attempt to replace Ec10 at Harvard got a lot of attention this week. There's a lot to recommend his approach, but there are plenty of people who are concerned about the apparent glossing over of causality. I'm honestly worried that some of these things may cause Angus Deaton and other critics of causal claims from RCTs to go into apoplectic fits. Just when you thought some of the messages might be getting through, along comes a new toy. So I should probably not mention that there's an update to the oldDonohue and Levitt paper on abortion and crime that claims it has better evidencewithout dealing with any of the problems in the underlying model.
3. Micro-Digital Finance: Microfinance can be pretty confusing when you get beyond the simple statements and start to worry about how it actually all works, and how it's changing, and what we do and don't know. Hudon, Labie and Szafarz have a nice little primer on those issues with a microfinance alphabet. I wish I had thought of doing this.
I complained last week about "mobile money" not including payment cards, which dominate the United States. But a telecom-driven mobile money product is now available in the US. Well sort of. Not sure what to make of this yet.
Caribou Digital and Mastercard Foundation have a new study of Kenyan microentrepreneurs "platform practices." I also don't know what to make of this, but that's probably because I haven't read it yet, but I figured many of you would be interested.
Among other things it's hard to know what to make of, there's Earnin, a sort-of payday lender, health care cost negotiator, fintech something. It's confusing. And New York State regulators are confused too, which is probably not a good sign for Earnin. But that's nothing new--I have to point again to City of Debtors, a book that documents New York city and state regulators confusion over how to regulate small dollar lending for more than a century.
Week of May 17, 2019
1. Causality: In this great book I know, Jonathan Morduch describes an obsession over causality as "the marker of the tribe" of economists. Most people outside the field, then, might be surprised to find out how unsettled the science of causality is and how much, after all these years, the practice of academic economics is 80% arguing about causal inference. Well, at least in the circles of applied micro that I run in. Recently Emi Nakamura, an "empirical macroeconomist", won the Clark Medal("American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge") for her work mapping macro theory to macro reality. One of her more well-known papers is a discussion of the gap between theory and evidence in macro; it has a jaw-dropping section on the best existing "evidence" on the effects of monetary policy. So much for an obsession over causal identification.
Now before getting too holier-than-thou over what is considered evidence in macroeconomics, it's worth pointing out that the experimental micro-crowd is just getting around to measuring general equilibrium effects, the defining feature of macro debates. I've linked multiple times to recent work on GE effects of microcredit (and related programs) on labor markets (See here for links and lots of discussion on that). While I was writing about that the other day, it occurred to me to wonder, given what we know about peer effects in education, whether anyone had looked at whether spillovers/GE effects were responsible for the rapid fade-out of early childhood education interventions. Less than 24 hours later, this new paper from List, Momeni and Zenou showed up in my Twitter feed, finding large spillover effects from an early childhood intervention (1.2 SD! on non-cognitive skills, which are increasingly found to be the more important feature of such programs), which lead to substantial underestimation of program impact. On a related note, here's a short video of Paul Niehaus talking about the value of experiments at scale, including better measurement of GE effects.
Still, there are lots of appealing things about using experiments to establish causality, even if it is somewhat akin to looking for the keys under the streetlights. For instance street lights cause a 36% reduction in nighttime outdoor crime in New York City housing developments. Unfortunately, people really don't like the idea of being experimented on, or even the idea of other people being part of an experiment even when the treatment arms are "unobjectionable." (MR summary here). I'm not really sure how to think about that.
If you want to dig deep into causality discussions, Cyrus Samii's syllabus for hisQuant II class this spring is here. Lots (and lots) of interesting and useful links there. If you're more of the video type, Nick Huntington-Klein has a new series of videos on causal inference, including one on causal diagrams and using Daggity to draw them. If you are among the obsessed and want to be even more so, Macartan Humphreys is looking for a post-doc to work with him on causal inference at WZB Berlin.
2. Academic Publishing: To understand the RCT movement you have to know something about one of the world's least efficient markets: economics journals (Yes, I'm sure someone has a paper/post explaining how the market is actually efficient after all). Seema Jayachandran tweeted this week about stats from her first year as co-editor at AEA: Applied: "4% were R&R, 36% were reject w/ reports, 60% were desk rejects." All of her R&Rs were eventually accepted and average and median time to decision was less than 2 months.
Data on the acceptance rates at all the AEA journals shows that Seema is doing an exceptional job. AEJ: Micro received 415 papers over a 12 month period, made decisions on only 55% of them, which were all rejections. Yes, zero of those 415 papers were accepted. The overall data led to this thread from Jake Vigdor with the provocative question: "If a journal...never accepts a manuscript, does it exist?" Or how about this paper from Clemens, Montenegro and Pritchett that was finally published in REStat after a decade in R&R? For the record, I have a paper with Michael that we got back for R&R after 4 years that I'm supposed to be revising but I'm writing the faiV instead. While I'm grinding an axe, let me also boost this question from Justin Sandefur on why citations still exist and haven't been replaced by hyperlinks. I wonder if an estimation of the dead weight loss from searching for, formatting and copyediting citation details could get published in an economics journal?
One of the reasons for the dismal acceptance rates in journals is the same as the dismal acceptance rates at top ranked universities. Reputation matters a lot. Tatyana Deryugina has a (revised) proposal on a different way of ranking journals that could lead to a more efficient publishing market. It's a start.
And to close out with some positive news: JDE is now prospectively accepting papers based on pre-analysis plans, without requiring the authors to commit to publishing there. It's almost as if the editors aren't maximizing their oligopolistic power. I hope they don't have their economist credentials revoked.
3. Digital Finance/Bangladesh: When the subject turns to mobile money, the country under discussion is still almost always Kenya even 12 years after the founding of m-Pesa. I have a particular axe to grind about counting use of mobile money without including payment cards, but there is now another reason to look beyond Kenya. There are now more people in Bangladesh with mobile money accounts than in Kenya. Of course, that's a function of population--penetration in Kenya is 73% (axe grinding: 70% of Americans have a credit card; this discussion does not include China), while it's just over 20% in Bangladesh. But we should expect adoption to accelerate in Bangladesh, and Kenya to be left well in the dust in terms of accounts.
Week of May 10, 2019
1. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week: This week, people around the United States give gifts to show appreciation for teachers. One gift that teachers really like is a decent salary. Way back in the late 1970s, U.S. teachers were paid about 5 percent less than other workers with comparable education and skills. But hey, what’s 5 percent? Did you become a teacher to get rich? Hopefully not, since the U.S. teacher penalty is now nearly 20 percent. (Incidentally, evidence from teachers in Rwanda and health workers in Zambia suggests that recruiting career-focused or salary-focused providers delivers at least as good outcomes hiring people with a focus on pro-social motivation. So even if you did go into it to “get rich,” students and patients will be okay.) In Latin America, teachers faced a gap but it was narrowing in the early 2000s. In Africa, primary teachers face a pay gap but not secondary teachers. In the U.S., teachers have been striking at high levels in the last year, in part over salary, and I recently wrote a piece on what the U.S. can learn from international research on raising teacher salaries. In most cases, raising salaries doesn’t increase effort of teachers currently on the job, but it does matter for attracting and retaining good teachers. (Salary increases can also be a good opportunity to introduce other reforms.) De Ree and others make the argument that because the returns to salary increases take place relatively far in the future, it’s unlikely to be a cost effective education investment relative to immediate quality improvements. That said, the high-income countries with the best education results are those that pay their teachers well.
2. First, Do No Harm (in schools): The primary objective of a formal education is arguably to learn things. At least, that’s what the World Bank argues; I realize the statement is not without controversy. But the first priority – if we can separate that from the primary objective – may be to keep children safe. Salisbury has a recent essay on the dual dangers of risky school buildings and violence perpetrated by school workers in low- and middle-income environments. This has been in the news recently with the collapse of a nursery and primary school n Lagos, Nigeria, and the revelation that a staff member at a charity running schools to help vulnerable girls in Liberia was in fact raping girls [Or, you know, the US's refusal to do anything to protect children from being murdered in their schools, so that children have to sacrifice their lives to save their peers--TO]. But it’s not just the news. A recent survey of children in Liberian primary schools shows that one in four children admit to having had sex with a teacher (and more with any member of staff), and in Kerala, India, more than one in five adolescents reported sexual abuse in the last year. Three-quarters reported physical abuse. I’m reminded of this horrifying line inJennifer Makumbi’s masterful novel Kintu, when a primary school girl in Uganda is raped by her math teacher: She “bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care.” It’s hard to imagine children learning and thriving in school under threat of violence.
3. Get the Lights On: By the latest estimates, more than half of people in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to electricity. Last week, Arlet, Ereshchenko, & Rocha highlighted that this is not a village problem: one quarter of the unelectrified are in urban areas. Part of the problem is the irregularity of the available power: regular power outages – common in many countries – deter households from connecting to the power grid. Another factor is how complicated it is to connect to the grid, which is unsurprising: If we want people to do things that they probably want to do anyway (like connecting to the grid), then make it easy for them. Yesterday the World Bank launched a big report on energy in Africa, which showed that in some places, people don’t get electricity even if they live within access to an electrical grid. Connection costs are high and – in addition to the consistency problem above – “electricity connection via conventional AC (alternating current) supply requires minimum building standards that many existing houses do not meet.”
Week of May 2, 2019
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.
