Week of September 10, 2012

This is our late summer/back to school edition of Links We Like. Let us know if we missed anything critical over the summer!

• Tim Ogden on "Managing the Difficult Trade-offs in Microfinance Regulation" 
• The US Financial Diaries Project is Hiring  
•  An anthropological perspective on Pay for Performance HT‏@KarenGrepin
•  "The Aid Fungibility Debate and Medical Journal Peer Review" by David Roodman
• Dan Rozas on "Can Borrowers be Trusted to Reschedule their Own Loans?"
• "A network view of economic development" by Cesar Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann
• US Census Burea publishes its annual report on US income, poverty and health insurance coverage 
• Tim Harford on the results from the world's largest RCT - "Cash on Delivery for the World's Poorest" 
• BBC: "How Technology Democratized Development "
• Minnesota Post: "The problem with asking Are you Better Off" and ignoring counterfactuals
• Global remittance flows beautifully visualized
• Owen Barder's Complexity and development (presentation and podcast)
• "Conversations on Complexity: A Tribute to Elinor Ostrom" by Ben Ramalingam
• NYT: Churches go cashless
• The Atlantic: "The rise of economic segregation" -- Mapping income inequality in America

Week of July 16, 2012

We haven’t posted an update on stuff we’ve been reading for quite some time. So, here’s a round-up of some to the articles, blogs and papers we’ve been reading. 

• Shamika Ravi on the Microfinance Bill 2012: A Move Towards Responsible Microfinance in India 
• The Wall Street Journal on the Indian government’s introduction of a bill to regulate microfinance 
• Andhra Pradesh government doesn't like India's federal government’s microfinance bill, and seeks changes 
• Hope Springs a Trap, an Economist article on microfinance for the ultra-poor. 
• David Roodman talks about whether microfinance works and his new book, Due Diligence, with Owen Barder at the Development Drums
• Timothy Ogden on women, banking and financial inclusion  and why the social component matters 
• Digicel Debuts First Non-Bank Mobile Payment System 
• Segmentation for Innovation: Understanding the Financial Service Needs of the Poor in Mexico 
• Financial Inclusion and Stability--what does research show? Scary how little we really know. 
• The future is here: An innovative bank that doesn't treat its poorest customers as a different species 
• The Economist: Banking in the developing world: The poor are different 
• "Is Behavioral Finance Relevant to (Consumer Protection) Policymaking?" 
• The Financial Literacy Movement: Some recent evidence about financial education 
• Financial Literacy: A Review of the Literature 
• The New York Times "Bits" column on the microinsurance revolution
• Esther Duflo and the "Benefits of Hope" 
• The 1 Percent’s Problem: Joseph Stiglitz on why plutocrats should care about inequality in Vanity Fair 
• Harvard Kennedy School Study: "Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys When Moving Out of Poor Neighborhoods"
• Economics from the neck down: "The Biology of Bubble and Crash" 
• French intellectual Pierre Bourdieu on photography, seeing and Algeria’s poor 
• Chris Berg on Remittances Dominate Aid Yet Remain Unspoken 
• Charles Kenney on the "Big Mac Theory of Development" featuring findings from new paper from Princeton Economist Orley Ashenfelter 
• The Global Findex Database: The World Bank’s Development Research Group, has constructed the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database as the first public database of indicators that consistently measure people’s use of financial products across economies and over time. 
• Givewell.org’s review of the Millenium Village Program is a good overview of the concerns raised 
• Social Investment: A Review of the Literature 
• Marc Bellemare writes on "Replication, Publication Bias & Negative Findings" 
• The rise of microcurrencies changing how we buy and our societal relations 
• Supporting the U.S. Working Poor Thru Policy Initiatives in Delaware

Week of March 12, 2012

A sampling of what we've been reading this week from around the web:

• FAI Researcher Jonathan Bauchet on "Details Matter: Insurance Makes Sense, So Why Isn’t it More Popular?"
• Nickeled and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich on "American Poverty, 50 years Later"

Some TED Talks that you may not have heard:

• Sendhil Mullainathan on "Solving Social Problems with a Nudge" 
• Esther Duflo on "Social Experiments to fight Poverty" 
• Eldar Shafir: "Living under Scarcity" 
• Hans Rosling's "New Insights on Poverty" 
• Nokia Researcher Jan Chipchase on how people interact with mobile phones. 
• Iqbal Quadir says mobile phones fight poverty 
• Richard Wilkinson on "How economic inequality harms societies."

Week of March 5, 2012

Articles, blogs and papers we've been reading over the past month:

• Obama to appoint Eldar Shafir to financial capability advisory council 
• NYT: Big Data's Grassroots Revolution
• Eye-Witness Accounts of Vikram Akula's Humble Harvard Talk
• First Edition of the Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopm
• Mobile Banking and Financial Inclusion: two perspectives in Slate Magazine
• New credit-risk models for the unbanked, a new report from McKinsey on Society 
• Ignacio Mas: "...what poor people need most is to be connected. With connections come opportunities." 
• A new paper on the science of willpower
• Timothy Ogden on the Poor and the True Costs of Joining Financial Systems
• Microfinance in Bangladesh: It's Not What You Thought says Elisabeth Rhyne 
• Daniel Rozas on "The Economics of Microsavings" and "High yield savings as the lynchpin of deposit-driven microfinance" 
• David Leonhardt's must read on our middle-class entitlement
• Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta argue rich people make better parents in: Stress Impacts Good Parenting 
• The Roodman-Bateman Debate: A CFI Dialogue
• NYT: Your mistaken belief in financial willpower
• What cash transfers tell us about the humanitarian community