1. Economics? What Is It Good For?: It's hard to spend any time paying attention to methodological and disciplinary debates without thinking of the Planck/Samuelson dictum about science advancing via funerals. Here, I'm thinking of attitudes toward the value of field experiments specifically and the "credibility revolution" generally. Christopher Ruhm recently gave a speech, in paper form here, about the "credibly-answered unimportant questions" vs "plausibly-but-uncertainly-answered important questions" debate. I found it helpful because it makes the hollowness of this concern more evident than usual, but you'll have to wait on the book chapter I'm procrastinating on to read why. Noah Smith has a more charitable take on Ruhm's speech, with the added important note that one of the big problems of the field is that outsiders don't understand the difference at all.
On the credibility side of things, there are issues beyond just the identification strategy. Here's an interview with Ted Miguel on transparency and reproducibility, a neglected part of the credibility revolution as far as I'm concerned. David Roodman has resurfaced with two new papers doing the hard work of reproducing results. He looks at Bleakley's study of the effects of hookworm elimination in the US and of malaria control in the Americas, questioning the result of the first, but largely upholding the result of the second.
But there's yet another dimension of credibility that I feel like is even more neglected, hearkening back to Paul Romer's mathiness paper: the comprehensibility of methods and tools. Here's a recent example: Declare Design has a lengthy discussion of whether and when to cluster standard errors, inspired by questions posed by David McKenzie and Chris Blattman. It's great. But is anyone else concerned about how few people actually understand the statistical methods we rely on? And that problem is going to get worse, as more and more machine learning and AI techniques come to the fore, techniques that perhaps even fewer understand. And the people that do understand them often don't understand causal inference or the philosophical issues around such basic concepts as fairness.
I guess, therefore, in fairness I should point out that apparently economics is good for sports, specifically the NFL (at last), and it is good for showing that the Planck/Samuelson dictum is true.
2. A Clash of Civilizations: Part of the curious thing about the way the RCT debates in economics evolved is the frequent citing of the use of RCTs in medicine as justification for their use in economics. It's curious because seemingly the understanding of causal inference methods in medicine isn't great. Here's a piece from JAMA (trigger warning: it calls RCTs the gold standard) on why you shouldn't take people out of your treatment group and put them into your control group because the treatment didn't work for them. It's not quite that bad, but still. Here's a thread from Amitabh Chandra on that paper and the general lack of causal inference understanding in medicine.
And here is a fascinating piece of work about how causal claims in health research get steadily ratcheted up. The authors looked at the 50 most shared journal articles about the health effects of exposure to something, finding "that only 6% of studies exhibited strong causal inference, but that 20% of academic authors in this sample used language strongly implying causality." And then the general news media further ratcheted up the causal claims.
I include that as important background to the clash of civilizations that happened recently when Jennifer Doleac, Anita Mukherjee and Molly Schnell wrote about the causal effects of harm reduction strategies related to opioid addiction, reviewing the literature and especially their paper on the impact of naloxone distribution. They find that naloxone access reduces short-term mortality but increases long-term mortality. That doesn't sit well with a wide variety of people outside economics. This is one of the tamer reactions from outside economics (trigger warning: it also refers to RCTs as the gold standard), tamer in the sense that it actually attempts to grapple a bit with the issues. But it ultimately settles on a version of the trope that "we already know the answer, so your causal inference sucks" and "Here's a study of a different intervention that works, so your causal inference sucks." You have to admire (well, you don't, but I do) Doleac for continuing to wade into controversial topics where there are people with very strong priors such as whether bail-setting algorithms might in fact be fairer than judges.
Public Health and Medicine aren't the only areas where economics clashes with other disciplines. Perhaps that has something to do with how insular economics publishing is. Tying all this together, here's a thread from Jake Vigdor about economic publishing insularity (See Graphic of the Week below) linking to this very cool set of visualizations about cross-disciplinary references in academic journals. Suffice it to say Econ is not doing well at being noticed outside of Econ journals. Perhaps the Doleac et al paper may make a dent in the public health journals.
Week of December 10, 2018
1. Targeting: I intended for the faiVLive conversation to spend more time on targeting than we did--it's a sort of rushed conversation at the end. Targeting is something that I've been thinking about a lot, but I'm not sure what I think yet. So forgive me for just ruminating on a few things here.
The whole concept of microcredit is based on targeting--every lender has to target not only those interested in taking a loan but those interested in repaying a loan. Hand-in-hand with targeting repayers was targeting borrowers who were "entrepreneurs," people who would start a business, since the belief was a new microenterprise was the only plausible way for these very poor households to repay. But since the rhetoric emphasized that the poor were natural entrepreneurs, targeting repayers substituted 1:1 for targeting entrepreneurs. Given the findings of microcredit impact studies--namely that while average impact is minimal, there are people who see large gains--the focus on targeting has returned. See for instance, asking middle men who the best farmers are, or surveying other microenterprises.
But if your aim is reducing poverty, then you have to care about more than just finding the borrowers who will repay and have the highest returns on capital--you have to care about equity as well and the effect on, or exclusion of, the poorest or least able to generate high returns. Earlier this year I linked to a paper by Hanna and Olken on the equity effects of targeted transfers vs. UBI. Here's an interview with the two that summarizes their findings: for most poor countries, targeted transfers far outperform a UBI in terms of total welfare. And by the way, here's new Banerjee et al paper from Indonesia showing limited distortions from proxy-means tests.
Of course, in targeting microcredit we are doing the opposite essentially: looking for a proxy-means test to exclude the least-able to generate high returns. What effects might that have? If we boost market efficiency, it could be good for most everyone. That's not just theoretical--here's an empirical finding from Jensen and Miller on improving market efficiency in Kerala boat-building finding higher aggregate quality, lower production costs and lower quality-adjusted prices. But maybe not. That paper above on using middle-men to target finds that traditional allocation of loans does better for the poorest. And as we discussed on the faiVLive conversation, there can be systematic differences in market structure that limits who can generate high returns (in this case, among women seamstresses in Ghana). It's why I worry about what exactly is being measured in targeting algorithms like EFL/Lenddo.
The possible gains and losses have to be measured against the cost of targeting. The cost of microcredit as it exists, without targeting, is pretty low. The median subsidy per loan is about $25, not much for spreading access to the liquidity management features of microcredit well beyond those with high returns to capital. And then there is reason to think about the effect of greater targeting on the microfinance business model. Here is one of the few economics papers to make me actually angry, suggesting that microcredit contracts were purposefully designed to limit the growth of borrower's businesses. While I wholly reject that claim, the underlying idea is worth considering: microcredit's low relative costs are based on a mass-lending business model and MFIs have largely failed to find a way to compete higher up the banking value chain. Altering that business model could have unintended consequences. That's not just based on that paper. As I mentioned last week, City of Debtors, a book about small sum lending in New York City during the 20th century confirms the business model problem is real and pervasive.
So I don't really know what I think. I'll keep thinking about it, but as always I appreciate your thoughts if you're willing to share them.
2. US Inequality: I haven't covered US Inequality for several weeks, and so things have been building up. And there's been a whole lot of new stuff in the last few weeks. Let's start with the state of median US income over the last 30 years. The widely held current view is that incomes for all but the top quintile or decile have been stagnant. But that's heavily dependent on all the adjustments that need to be made for taxes, transfers, inflation and innovation. Stephen Rose at the Urban Institute summarizes the past and new work trying to measure changes in median income, and then writes in more detail about the methodological issues. One thing that had particularly slipped by me: Picketty, Saez and Zucman have a newish paper updating the famous results that showed stagnation and find median incomes have increased about 30% over the last 30 years. That shifts the proportion of gains by the top decile from around 90% to around 50% (I'm intentionally rounding these numbers because they are so sensitive to methodological choices, that I think we're all better off not reporting precise numbers because of the illusion of certainty that goes along with them). Perhaps one of the reasons that these new findings didn't seem to get as much attention as the idea of stagnation for the middle class, is that the new paper also finds that stagnation is true for the bottom 50% of the income distribution.
This week the US Census also released it's "Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates" for 2017, with county-level data on incomes and poverty rates. They find that over the last 10 years, median incomes in 80% of US counties were unchanged, with 11% of counties seeing an increase and 8% seeing a decrease. When you look at the maps, it's apparent that a majority of the counties seeing an increase are related to the fracking boom (and thus mostly in places with very few people). On the poverty front, there's a whole lot of stagnation too, with almost 90% of counties seeing no change, but 8% seeing an increase and only 3% seeing a decrease. Not an encouraging picture.
Whenever you talk about incomes and poverty, it's worthwhile to think about the definition of poverty. Here's Noah Smith on updating the definition of poverty to include volatility (though he shockingly fails to mention the US Financial Diaries). And here's Angus Deaton on "How America poverty became fake news"--with some more methodological detail and the horrid engagement of the present administration with international attempts to measure poverty.
There's plenty new on the policy front as well. Here's a new paper estimating the total budget effect of the EITC--finding that the program self-finances 87% of its cost by reducing use of other transfer programs and increasing taxes collected. And here's The Hamilton Project on the work histories of people receiving SNAP and Medicaid benefits, finding that the majority are working, but irregularly and a substantial portion would "fail to consistently meet a 20 hour per week-threshold" because their hours worked vary so much from week-to-week.
Week of December 3, 2018
1. faiVLive Background: The motivation for the faiVLive experiment is discussing what to think about microcredit impact given all the research in recent years. If you can't make it, or if you can, here's your quick cheat sheet to the recent research.
Of course it's starts with the average impact of microcredit being very modest. A Bayesian Hierarchical model look at the data confirms those findings. But there is important heterogeneity hidden within those average effects--"gung-ho" microborrowers do see substantial gains from increased access to credit. It's also true that these are mostly studies of expanding access to formal credit, not introducing it. That's hard to measure, but we can get a cleaner view of the value of credit when it gets taken away from most everyone--and that shows significant benefits, though through a somewhat unexpected channel: casual labor wages. Changes in labor wages can matter a lot for understanding the impact of a program, even entirely masking any benefits of an intervention with evidence that it makes a substantial difference in many contexts. And it's clear that changes in labor supply are quickly passed through into labor rates--in this case, the markets seem to be working fairly well. But it's not just labor markets. When microcredit affects local markets--by increasing or decreasing the supply of tradeable goods--the benefits may be substantial but mostly captured by the people who aren't using microcredit (what economists call general equilibrium effects). Which makes it all the more important to understand local market dynamics, especially when in many cases microenterprises are operating in sectors where supply exceeds demand. That being said, microcredit is a cheap intervention relative to other options. And it's possible we could increase the returns to microcredit for more reluctant microenterprise operators by boosting their aspirations. Or perhaps by doing better targeting of lending. But is it worth targeting? Households do seem to do a pretty good job of allocating access to capital to its most productive use within the household, and the gung-ho entrepreneurs are benefiting even without the expense of targeting.
2. MicroDigitalFinance and Household Finance: I suppose all of the above would qualify here as well, but here's a bunch of different new stuff, starting with the digital side of things. There are two new papers about the effects of SMEs adopting digital payments. In Kenya, an encouragement intervention led to 78% of treated restaurants and 28% of pharmacies adopting Lipa Na m-Pesa, and consequent increases in access to credit. In Mexico, a different kind of encouragement--the government distributed massive numbers of debit cards as part of the Progresa program--led small retailers to adopt POS terminals. That led to wealthier customers shifting some of their purchasing to these smaller retailers, and increased sales and profits for the retailers, but not an increase in employees or wages paid. On a side note, it's curious that the smaller shock of debit card distribution (pushing debit card ownership to 54% of households) had a large effect on retailers but the larger shock of m-Pesa being adopted by practically everyone has not led to more Lipa Na m-Pesa adoption.
A few weeks ago I featured a puzzle in savings from two savings encouragement experiments--the encouragement worked but savings plateau at a level well below what would seem optimal. Isabelle Guerin sent me a couple of papers that I'm still reviewing that might help explain why, but this week I stumbled across another example. The US CFPB, back in the days when it was allowed to do stuff and wasn't a hollow shell of existential dread, ran an experiment using American Express Serve cards and the "Reserve" functionality. They find that encouraging savings works--people boost their savings--but that the savings plateau after the 12 week encouragement and stay at roughly the same level for 16 months. That's consistent with the results from India and Chile but not with a model of accumulating lump sums or precautionary savings. You would expect among this population that they would experience a shock in that 16 month period and draw down the savings. Participants say they reduce payday loan use, but frankly I don't believe any claims about payday behavior that isn't based on administrative data (and it doesn't make sense if balances were stable).
And finally because I want to encourage this behavior, Maria May sent me an interesting new paper on offering microcredit borrowers flexibility in repayment--customers get two "skip payment" coupons to use during the term of their 12 month loan cycle. Consistent with the much earlier work from Field et al, it yields more investment from borrowers, better outcomes and lower defaults.
3. Evidence-Based Policy: I noted last week that GiveWell, where I have served on the board since it's founding, released it's Top Charity recommendations. One of those is GiveDirectly. GiveWell, as is it's wont, wrote up some details of it's analysis of GiveDirectly, particularly about spillovers from cash transfers. That analysis was significantly informed by a forthcoming paper on general equilibrium effects and spillovers from one of GiveDirectly's programs that GiveWell was given access to even though it is not yet public. Berk Ozler took issue with that. And GiveWell responded. I have nothing whatsoever to do with GiveWell's research process or conclusions, but I was heavily involved advising GiveWell on its response to Berk's questions.
Week of November 26, 2018
1. faiVYourJMP: Let's start there with a paper from Ryan Edwards on palm oil plantation expansion in Indonesia. That he finds trade-offs certainly shouldn't be surprising, much less astounding, but it is surprising how well he documents how the growth of export-led agriculture reduces poverty and increases consumption--including the specific channels by which that happens--and the connection to deforestation. Specifically, "each percentage point of poverty reduction corresponds to a 1.5-3 percentage point loss of forest area." Put another way, it's astounding to be able to see the price of poverty reduction outside of a carefully designed cash-based experiment.
And let me give a shout out to the Development Impact Blog team at the World Bank who were the inspiration to do this. Their crop of "Blog your JMP" posts is growing by the day and includes many entries worthy of your attention.
2. MicroDigitalFinance: Here's an astounding story about predatory lending and debt collection in New York (and from there, across the US). And I don't care how cynical you are, this is stunning because it's perfectly legal--so legal that there are registered investment companies gathering capital in public markets to do more of it.
That story then led me, via Rebecca Spang, to a book that came out at the beginning of this year that I'm embarrassed that I didn't know about, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance by Anne Fleming. It tells the story of small dollar credit in New York City and the attempts to regulate it and protect consumers, with lots of unintended consequences along the way. Although I've only begun to read it, what's astounding is how easily, if you changed the names of places and people, you could convince someone this was a book about modern microfinance. There's one chapter that could easily be pasted into Portfolios of the Poor with no one the wiser. Fleming is a law professor, and so she doesn't make the connection to the economics literature, past or present (at least that I've seen so far), which is frustrating but also assuages my guilt at being unaware of the book. Anyway, if you care about financial services for low-income households, regulation and/or consumer protection, you need to pick up this book.
It would be easy to make a snide and cliche comment about those who cannot learn from history, but is too much to ask to learn from present in other places? Here's a story about "neo-banks" in the US attempting to remake the banking industry, while confronting the hard reality that even without a physical presence, the margins on transactional accounts are razor thin. But, like Fleming's book, it's easy to read this as a story about how banks and MFIs are struggling to cope with the threat of digital financial services being provided by telecom firms which are built on a high-volume, low-margin business model.
That is a major theme of the e-MFPs new report on trends in microfinance/financial inclusion, released this week. It's the output of a survey of providers, funders, consultants and researchers on where the industry is headed. I was encouraged to read that other major challenges noted include "client protection, privacy...and preventing an erosion of the social focus of financial inclusion...in the face of new entrants." I'm betting those aren't on the list of very many people in the fintech/neobank space in the US.
Finally here's a story from September that somehow slipped by me: Kiva is working with the government of Sierra Leone to use blockchain to create a national ID/credit bureau. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one but it definitely seems like the kind of thing that would benefit from and generate lots of opportunities to learn from other places. If any of the faiV readers at Kiva want to share more, please call me.
3. MicroSmallMediumFirms: I'm often frustrated that I don't get to spend more time thinking about firms--those of you who know me know I've been wanting to start a project on "subsistence retail" for years. Hope springs eternal--maybe next year is the year I get to do that.
But in the meantime, here's a job market paper from Gabriel Tourek featured on Development Impact that finds an astounding reaction to a tax cut in Rwanda: the firms pay more even though they owe less. What's going on?
Week of November 12, 2018
1. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Since it hasn't featured for a few weeks, I'm going to lead with our old friends this week. If you're in development circles, you know about Aadhaar. And if you're a reader of the faiV you know about China's intrusive citizen monitoring and control (let's dispense with calling it a "social credit score"--this apologia for what's happening is frightening in its own right). But did you know that Venezuela is on the forefront of assigning every citizen an ID and tracking their behavior, including their votes (maybe)? Here's a Twitter thread with some additional details from the reporter of that piece. Guess who's providing the technology?
The frightening frontier in the US is from private technology companies, well, let's be honest, the frightening frontier is Facebook. Here's a New York Times investigation of the company's conduct that is jaw-dropping, over and over again. Where is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him? For now, we've got Kara Swisher's thoughts on cleaning up the "toxic smoke".
Tying the domestic and global back together, here's Susan Liautaud of CGD on how the perspective on the ethics of automation and AI may look different in developing countries.
2. Development Finance and Banking: Sticking with CGD, here's the polymath of development, Charles Kenny, on reforming the World Bank's Private Sector Window to comply with, y'know, the World Bank's guidance on appropriate design for private sector subsidies.
The big question for development finance (and social finance of all sorts) is whether it is crowding-in or crowding-out private sector investment, or neither. Here's Paddy Carter on the "Elusive Quest for Additionality" (have to love a shout-out to old school Bill Easterly) in summary form and in full length paper form (with van de Sijpe and Calel).
Let's say that there is additionality and DFIs are increasing capital flows to developing countries. The next big question is, what impact does that have? Here's Judith Tyson and Thorsten Beck on how those capital flows are affecting domestic financial system development. They conclude that the capital flows are too pro-cyclical and not doing enough to boost domestic capital markets.
There is a specific kind of capital flow that is actively undermining financial development specifically and development in general: regulations on anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing (regulations are a form of capital right?). Here's a brief from the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI on how bad it's gotten in humanitarian relief. And just a reminder that this is a pervasive problem. No really,it's a pervasive problem.
Speaking of financial system development, here's an interesting post on what is happening in Ghana's banking sector--well, what's happening is consolidation, the post explains why and what's next. And here's a perspective on the liquidity crunch for Indian NBFCs.
3. MicroDigitalFinance: It feels like we might be hitting an inflection point on mobile money services, the point where it's no longer possible to talk about it without prominently noting the negatives. CGAP has a new report on digital credit in Kenya and Tanzania, which leads them to the conclusion that "It's Time to Slow Digital Credit's Growth in East Africa." Late payment and default rates are enough to make any MFI executive faint. One particularly interesting tidbit: loans taken in the morning are much more likely to be repaid than loans taken at night. That's not really surprising but it's amazing to have that level of insight. Of particular concern is that many borrowers don't understand the terms of the loans they are taking. All the progress made on consumer protection for MFIs doesn't matter much if the market shifts to getting credit elsewhere.
Week of November 5, 2018
1. Household Finance: One of the trips keeping me busy was to Mexico City for the PRONAFIM conference. Here's a video version of my current thinking on household finance, in Spanish.
Of course, one of the key questions in household finance is to what extent a household is a household. I've had a hard time not thinking about this recent paper from Afzal et al, which through a series of "lab in the field" experiments, shows there are a lot of schisms in the household. Let me just quote from the abstract: "Subjects are often no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, and many subjects disregard what they believe or know about others' preferences when assigning them a consumption bundle." Is there some explanation there for the puzzle in the Graphic of the Week (see below?).
In the household finance realm I often pick on financial literacy--specifically as a bellweather for evidenced-based policy (if money is going into financial literacy, evidence isn't making a dent on policy). Here's some interesting new evidence on financial literacy and why it doesn't seem to work, from Carpena and Zia. They are looking for what parts of financial education might affect behavior, and find attitudes matter more than awareness or numeracy. I feel like that connects to this new paper from Gine and Goldberg documenting endowment effects in account choice in Malawi, and that the endowment effect can be overcome with experience, but maybe not.
2. Inequality: Teaching a class on wealth inequality and policy makes anything on the topic grab my attention just a bit more. And there is a lot out there. On the downside, there's a lot out there and my attention is drawn to all of it. Here's a handy Twitter thread guide (and in a perhaps easier to follow/read format) to the global inequality literature that I found very helpful. Here's a new paper from Ayyagari, Demirguc-Kunt and Maksimovic calling into question the idea that a group of "star" firms are pulling away from others and boosting inequality. You probably already know about this, but the Chetty team has published their Opportunity Atlas. And here's a recent paper from Card et al. on the role of school quality in transmitting economic inequality in the US during the 20th century (in digest form here).
3. Our Algorithmic Overlords: Nothing particular profound here but I couldn't resist pairing these two pieces together: a) "China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots’" and b) A list of artificial intelligence programs that do "what their creators specify, not what they mean." I suppose since the actions of the AI programs sound a lot like children trying to annoy their parents, China's approach seems optimal?
Week of October 15, 2018
1. China: This is a very meta way of kicking things off, but I do think often of the gaps in knowledge that go along with the language gap between centers of academic inquiry and China (and to a lesser extent, India, Indonesia and Nigeria). It takes a lot of cognitive work to push back against the unconscious equation of value/quality with English-language facility, and that's just for the papers and stories that ever do appear in English (thank goodness for Jing Cai!). Anyway, here's a small attempt to address some of the knowledge gap.
The P2P lending industry in China continues to melt down in very scary ways, and in ways reminiscent of bank runs in the US around railroad bubbles in the late 19th century. The common ingredients--a working class population with enough income to start seriously saving and limited outlets for saving/investing and even more limited consumer protections. It's ugly and getting uglier as the authorities crack down on both the lenders and protestors who have lost their savings.
But that's not the only credit market problem in China. The head of a very large state-backed lender was pushed out of the party for corruption (and he's not the first and likely not the last). Meanwhile, local governments have been creating weird vehicles to borrow via private (or are they public? it's hard to know what's the right phrase to use when it comes to China's hybrid economy) markets. Current estimates suggest there is a $5.8 trillion dollar local government credit problem. Amidst the trade war, the Chinese economy seems to slowing just at the time these credit market problems are coming to light--I don't see anything in these stories about a causal effect--and there are other signs of bad news. If you are a Planet Money listener, you may recall a recent story about a rumored "vast postal conspiracy" that largely checked out. This week the Trump administration announced that it is withdrawing from the Universal Postal Union, a system that was set-up for the US' benefit post-WWII but became a huge boon to small Chinese manufacturers. Planet Money's "The Indicator" also did a series recently on China's social credit scoring system, including talking with someone who has been blacklisted.
Finally, here's a story to lead us into the next item: accusations of racism by Chinese firms are becoming increasingly common in Kenya and other African countries were China has been investing heavily.
2. Global Development: The gap (particularly the growth gap) between high-income and low-income countries is what the field is all about, indeed "it's hard to think about anything else." The gap has been stubbornly high and growing since World War II. Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur and Arvind Subramanian have a new post at CGD, reacting to a new paper about the lack of convergence, pointing out that cross-country convergence has been happening since 1990. The authors of the paper respond on Twitter.
There's a curious connection that back when many of the original ideas of development economics posited that convergence should happen--e.g. poorer countries should grow faster than richer ones--while recognizing that it wasn't happening, one of the prescriptions was a "big push" to help poor countries escape a poverty trap. The idea of the big push eventually went into hibernation, but was revived around the time that the convergence did start happening (though we didn't know it yet). This time the big push was at the village level, not the country level. It didn't work any better there. Last week, the results of "the first independent impact evaluation" of Millenium Villages Project (of a village in Ghana) were released and the bottom-line is scathing. There was no gap-closing here--the only positive effects found, the study notes, could have been accomplished at dramatically lower cost. On a similar note, here's a look at another MVP-project village, Sauri, Kenya, and finding that locals did not believe in the benefits of MVP enough to bid up the prices for land in the village. Which honestly is kind of remarkable given all the money that was showering into the villages. You would think people would want to move there simply to benefit from the opportunities for corruption/patronage.
Finally, here's a really fascinating example of a growing gap--the gap in gender preferences grows with economic development and gender equality. This definitely feels like an "everything is obvious once you know the answer" example.
Week of September 24, 2018
1. Poverty and Inequality Measurement: How do you measure poverty, and by extension, inequality? Given how common a benchmark poverty is, it's easy to sometimes lose sight of how hard defining and measuring it is.
Martin Ravallion has a new paper on measuring global inequality that takes into account that both absolute and relative poverty (within a country) matter--for many reasons it's better to be poor in a high-income country than a low-income one, which is often missed in global inequality measures. Here's Martin's summary blog post. When you take that into account, global inequality is significantly higher than in other measures, but still falling since 1990.
The UK has a new poverty measure, created by the Social Metrics Commission (a privately funded initiative, since apparently the UK did away with its official poverty measure?) that tries to adjust for various factors including wealth, disability and housing adequacy among other things. Perhaps most interestingly it tries to measure both current poverty and persistent poverty recognizing that most of the factors that influence poverty measures are volatile. Under their measure they find that about 23% of the population lives in poverty, with half of those, 12.1%, in persistent poverty.
You can think about persistence of poverty in several ways: over the course of a year, over several years, or over many years--otherwise known as mobility. There's been a lot of attention in the US to declining rates of mobility and the ways that the upper classes limit mobility of those below them. That can obscure the fact that there is downward mobility (48% of white upper middle class kids end up moving down the household income ladder, using this tool based on Chetty et al data). I'm not quite sure what to make of this new paper, after all I'm not a frequent reader of Poetics which is apparently a sociology journal, but it raises an interesting point: the culture of the upper middle class that supposedly passes on privilege may be leading to downward mobility as well.
There's also status associated with class and income. On that dimension, mobility in the US has declined by about a quarter from the 1940s cohort to the 1980s cohort. That's a factor of "the changing distribution of occupational opportunities...not intergenerational persistence" however. But intergenerational persistence may be on the rise because while the wealth of households in the top 10% of the distribution has recovered since the great recession, the wealth of the bottom 90% is still lower, and for the bottom 30% has continued to fall during the recovery.
2. Debt: What factors could be contributing to the wealth stagnation and even losses of the bottom 90% in the US? Just going off the top of my head, predatory debt could be a factor. If only we had a better handle on household debt and particularly the most shadowy parts of the high-cost lending world. Or maybe it's the skyrocketing amount of student debt, combined with bait-and-switch loan forgiveness programs that are denying 99% of the applicants. I'll bet the CFPB student loan czar will be all over this scandal. Oh wait, that's right, he resigned after being literally banned from doing his job.
Week of September 17, 2018
1. MicroDigitalFinance: A few weeks ago I wrote that small-dollar short-term loans have always been the bane of the banking industry. We're getting a new test of that. US Bank is launching an alternative to payday loans: loans are between $100 and $1000 and repaid over three months. Interest rates are well below payday lending rates, but still around 70% APR--interestingly on US Bank's page about the loan they very clearly say: "Simple Loan is a a high-cost loan and other options may be available." All of that is good news. But the loans are only available to people with a credit rating (even if it's bad), who have had bank accounts with US Bank for 6 months and direct deposit for 3 months. It will be fascinating to watch take-up, repayment rates, and outcomes--those are where banks have always struggled in this market. Here's Pew's Nick Bourke's take on the US Bank move and the potential for others, with some more regulatory action, to follow suit.
I occasionally remark on insurance being the most amazing invention of all time. It's astounding that it works at all, even in the most developed, trusting and well-regulated markets (see this attempt by one of the US's oldest life insurance providers to collapse the market); it's not surprising that it's a struggle to make it work elsewhere, in the places where households face more risk and would most benefit from access to insurance. So I'm always interested in new work on insurance innovation. Here's a new paper on a lab-in-the-field insurance experiment in Burkina Faso. The basic insight is that many potential purchasers struggle with the certain cost of an insurance premium versus the uncertain payoff. It turns out that framing the premium around an uncertain rebate if there is no payout--which makes both premium and benefit uncertain--increases take-up, especially among those that value certainty most. Yes, you probably need to read that sentence again (and then click on the link to see that even that obtuse sentence is marginally clearer than the abstract). If we want to delve into the details of insurance contract construction, there's also a new paper that delves into how liquidity constraints--a huge factor that hasn't generally gotten enough attention--affect the perceived value of insurance contracts, and how to adjust the contracts accordingly.
And finally, William Faulkner's dictum that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." applies to fintech. A new paper finds that common law countries in sub-Saharan Africa have greater penetration of Internet, telecom and electricity infrastructure, and thus much greater adoption of mobile money and FinTech. That's consistent with history of banking literature that finds common law countries do better on financial system development, financial inclusion and SME lending.
For the record, I've clarified in my own mind the difference between the MicroDigitalFinance and Household Finance categories. The former provides perspective on providers, the latter on consumers. I reserve the right to break that typology as necessary or when it suits me.
2. Household Finance: I suppose another way to distinguish between the two categories is that MicroDigitalFinance features bad news only most of the time, while Household Finance is just all bad news. At least that's the way it feels when I come across depressing studies like this: Extending the term of auto loans (e.g. from 60 months to 72 months as has become increasingly common during this low-quality credit boom) leads to consumers taking loans at a) higher interest rates, and b) paying more for the vehicle. Liquidity constraints mean consumers pay much more attention to the monthly payment and get screwed.
Week of September 10, 2018
1. US Inequality: I talk a lot about congruence between the US and developing countries, but usually in the context of sharing lessons in the financial inclusion domain. But there are other domains where there is a lot more commonality. For instance radically corrupt policing. While this paper has been circulating for awhile, it's worth revisiting over and over again, and it's acceptance for publication is a convenient excuse. US cities and towns, when faced with budget deficits, ramp up arrests and fines of and property seizures from black and brown citizens but not white ones. Here's the easy to share Twitter thread version so you can send it to your not so economics-paper-inclined friends. To be clear, it's only second-order racism. The reason seems to be it's much easier to get away with stealing from people of color because of systemic racism.
Systemic racism like the premium that blacks pay for apartments, a premium that rises with the fraction white a neighborhood is. Lucky that the place you live has little effect on the quality of your education or your future job market opportunities. Oh, wait.
The US is still deeply segregated (cool visualization klaxon) and there has been virtually no progress on that front in decades. Part of the reason is exclusionary zoning which puts a floor on home prices well above the reach of black and brown households. Apparently though, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is planning on tying future grants to cities to cutting zoning restrictions on multi-family dwellings. That would be a rare bright light in the current administration's deregulation push.
2. Cash: I haven't done anything on cash transfers, universal, conditional or otherwise in quite a while. This week we got a flood. I'm going to try to cover the landscape first, before some summary thoughts. Blattman, Fiala and Martinez have an update on their cash grants to youth clubs in Uganda paper--the one that found large gains after four years. After nine years, the controls have caught up. Chris used the analogy of "a tightly coiled spring" as an explanation for why the gains in the first four years were so surprisingly large--and that analogy may still hold. No matter how high the spring jumps, it eventually returns to baseline. Here's Chris's Twitter thread on how his thinking has changed. Here's a Vox article by Dylan Matthews. At this point, if you pay any attention at all, you should expect Berk Ozler to have some thoughts. He does.
Meanwhile, IPA pulled off the greatest unintentional (I'm told by reliable sources--hi Jeff!) mass market advertisement for the release of a development economics working paper in history when the NYTimes Fixes column ran a long-delayed piece by Marc Gunther on using cash as a benchmark for development programs on Tuesday. The paper was being released Thursday. That paper, a comparison of a Catholic Relief Services program to a cost-equivalent cash grant, and a much larger cash grant, by McIntosh and Zeitlin is here. The IPA brief is here. The Vox article is here. And Berk's thoughts (about the Vox coverage really) are here. And Tavneet Suri's. But I'll give Craig and Andrew the last word--here's their post on Development Impact on how they think about the study and the issues.
