Jonathan J. Morduch

Policy decisions often depend on evidence generated elsewhere. We take a Bayesian decision-theoretic approach to choosing where to experiment to optimize external validity. We frame external validity through a policy lens, developing a prior specification for the joint distribution of site-level treatment effects using a microeconometric structural model and allowing for other sources of heterogeneity. With data from South Asia, we show that, relative to basing policies on experiments in optimal sites, large efficiency losses result from instead using evidence from randomly-selected sites or, conversely, from sites with the largest expected treatment effects.

National poverty rates are meant to track the share of populations that are poor in a given year. We show that, instead, de facto poverty rates often reflect the fraction of the year that households experience poverty. This transformation arises in low- and middle-income countries that follow expert guidelines for collecting household expenditure data. The de facto measures reflect seasonal variability and register deprivations of households not usually considered poor. With panel data from India we show how, contrary to historical definitions, global poverty depends on households’ abilities to smooth consumption within the year.

People on low-incomes in the UK develop multiple long-term health conditions over 10 years earlier than affluent individuals. Financial diaries -new to public health- are used to explore the lived experiences of financially-vulnerable individuals, diagnosed with at least one long-term condition, living in two inner-city London Boroughs. Findings show that the health status of these individuals is a key barrier to work opportunities, undermining their income. Their precarious and uncertain financial situation, sometimes combined with housing issues, increased stress and anxiety which, in turn, contributed to further deteriorate participants' health. Long-term health conditions limited the strategies to overcome moments of financial crisis and diarists frequently used credit to cope. Restrictions to access reliable services and timely support were connected to the progression of multiple long-term conditions. Models that integrate healthcare, public health, welfare and financial support are needed to slow down the progression from one to many long-term health conditions.

Behavioral household finance shows that people are often more willing to spend when using less tangible forms of money like debit cards or digital payments than when spending in cash. We show that this “payment effect” cannot be generalized to mobile money. We surveyed families in rural Northwest Bangladesh, where mobile money is mainly received from relatives working in factories. The surveys were embedded within an experiment that allows us to control for the relationships between senders and receivers of mobile money. The finding suggests that the source of funds matters, and mobile money is earmarked for particular purposes and thus less fungible than cash. In contrast to the expectation of greater spending, the willingness to spend in the rural sample was lower by 24 to 31 percent. In urban areas, where the sample does not receive remittances on net, there are no payment effects associated with mobile money.

The modern microfinance industry was built on the idea that lenders could (and should) profit while serving poor and excluded customers. This idea - that lenders could 'win' while customers would also 'win' - inspired the broader field of social enterprise and opened possibilities for business-driven responses to social problems. However, in hindsight it is possible to see that not only was the idea flawed - important claims underpinning the core idea have failed to find empirical support - but the lingering belief that 'win-win' was right continues to handicap not only financial inclusion and consumer protection policies, but the social investment and finance industry as a whole. The win-win formulation was driven by the assertion that customers would be indifferent to the level of interest rates on loans and that it was simply access to finance that mattered most to customers. The argument was used to justify charging the highest interest rates to the most operationally expensive customers, who turned out to not coincidentally be the poorest customers. However, studies show that customers are indeed sensitive to interest rates and that high interest rates discourage borrowers. Moreover, despite charging high rates, financial data show that most lenders failed to earn profit after fully accounting for the subsidies received from donors and social investors. Microfinance and the social investment industry it helped spawn remain important tools for addressing poverty and inequality, but both sectors are overdue for a transparent reckoning of the roles of subsidy (including its benefits) and greater recognition of the potential for exclusion caused by high prices and the drive for profitability or 'sustainability'. Muddled thinking on subsidy and prices handicapped the past but does not need to handicap the future.

High-frequency data show that the material condition of poverty is created by the interaction of insufficiency × instability × illiquidity. Reducing instability and/or illiquidity can thus reduce exposure to poverty even when average earning power (overall insufficiency) is unchanged. The high-frequency view shows competing needs for smoothing and spiking of spending, alongside competing needs for structure and flexibility in financial products. High-frequency instability also explains why ex post moral hazard (“strategic” default) is a particular problem for lenders and, in turn, why joint liability is difficult to sustain in microfinance. The high-frequency repayment structure of typical microfinance loan contracts is similar to the installment structure of consumer lending products and contractual saving products, explaining how microfinance loans work naturally for purposes other than business investment, despite lenders’ nominal intentions. The high-frequency view helps to show why microfinance loans remain popular despite mixed evidence on average impacts on household income. 

Microfinance has become a widely used tool to provide credit to areas and populations that traditionally lack access to conventional banking services. Originating as a poverty alleviation mechanism, microfinance has grown in scope and design as a larger means of improving financial inclusion. Despite the increase in access for new borrowers, much of the existing evidence has failed to find transformational effects on key outcomes such as profits and income. However, results are subject to significant variation across geographies, programme design and beneficiaries, and the heterogenous effects do lead to significant gains for certain populations. The incentives given to borrowers to encourage on-time repayment, the timing of repayments, and the flexibility of borrowers’ contracts all have an impact on both business outcomes and loan default rates. More recently, there is a growing body of literature looking at alternatives to loans, such as asset-based microfinance, that also show promise. Yet, as new innovations to microfinance are adapted around the world, further research is needed to explore which adaptations prove effective, in which contexts, and for whom.

This dialogue contributes to the 50th anniversary and 200th issue of Mondes en développement (Developing Worlds), the French and Belgian journal founded in 1973 by François Perroux of the Collège de France. To mark the anniversary, we discuss what has been learned about microfinance, which, as a modern movement, is also roughly 50 years old. We discuss issues including the early history of microfinance and how it arose from new views on poverty in the 1970s coupled with fall-0ut from the global debt crisis of the 1980s; the role of rhetoric within the microfinance sector; debates over subsidy; changing views of group lending; gender and finance; and whether everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.

Mobile banking and related digital financial technologies can make financial services cheaper and more widely accessible in low-income economies, but gender gaps persist. We present evidence from two connected field experiments in Bangladesh designed to encourage the adoption and use of mobile banking by poor, illiterate households. The study focuses on migrants who live in Dhaka and send money back to their extended families. Despite large differences between female and male migrants in income and education, the first experiment shows that a training program led to similarly large, positive impacts on mobile banking use by female migrants (a 51 percentage point increase) and male migrants (46 percentage point increase), substantially narrowing the gender gap. However, the increases in adoption did not lead to similar patterns in usage: men increased digital remittances by 11 times as much as women. A second experiment tests whether introducing the technology in the context of family networks made an additional difference to gender gaps. The evidence suggests an 11 percentage point increase in adoption by women and just a 1 percentage point increase by men, although statistical power is low for this comparison and estimates are imprecise.

Development economists use RCTs in two distinct ways, on the one hand to measure the impacts of a project (implemented in the field by donors, NGOs, etc.), on the other hand to carry out experiments in real environments (by artificially varying a parameter, to deduce "laws" from it)...

Just give people money. The idea is as simple as it is radical. At least it was radical until the coronavirus pandemic. With sluggish wages and household savings eroded by the pandemic, many struggling households simply need cash. Giving cash has turned out to be a powerful policy tool — its use is flexible, and households can spend it on their most pressing needs, whatever those are.

But not all money is the same. The amount matters, obviously, but the timing matters too. When you’re threatened with eviction, to take an extreme example, having the right amount of money at the right time can be the difference between maintaining housing and experiencing homelessness. The same amount of money received even a few weeks later might not help.

That probably seems obvious, but policies designed to support the finances of American families do not focus much on cash flows and the challenges they create in getting through the month or year. The focus has been instead on building long-term saving, income and wealth. To be successful in the long term, however, households need to be successful in the short term too. Short-term cash flows need more attention.

High-frequency data show that the material condition of poverty is created by the interaction of insufficiency × instability × illiquidity. Reducing instability and/or illiquidity can thus reduce exposure to poverty even when average earning power (overall insufficiency) is unchanged. The high-frequency view shows competing needs for smoothing and spiking of spending, alongside competing needs for structure and flexibility in financial products. High-frequency instability also explains why ex post moral hazard (“strategic” default) is a particular problem for lenders and, in turn, why joint liability is difficult to sustain in microfinance. The high-frequency repayment structure of typical microfinance loan contracts is similar to the installment structure of consumer lending products and contractual saving products, explaining how microfinance loans work naturally for purposes other than business investment, despite lenders’ nominal intentions. The high-frequency view helps to show why microfinance loans remain popular despite mixed evidence on average impacts on household income.

Microfinance has become a widely used tool to provide credit to areas and populations that traditionally lack access to conventional banking services. Originating as a poverty alleviation mechanism, microfinance has grown in scope and design as a larger means of improving financial inclusion. Despite the increase in access for new borrowers, much of the existing evidence has failed to find transformational effects on key outcomes such as profits and income. However, results are subject to significant variation across geographies, programme design and beneficiaries, and the heterogenous effects do lead to significant gains for certain populations. The incentives given to borrowers to encourage on-time repayment, the timing of repayments, and the flexibility of borrowers’ contracts all have an impact on both business outcomes and loan default rates. More recently, there is a growing body of literature looking at alternatives to loans, such as asset-based microfinance, that also show promise. Yet, as new innovations to microfinance are adapted around the world, further research is needed to explore which adaptations prove effective, in which contexts, and for whom.

The initial spread of COVID-19 halted economic activity as countries around the world restricted the mobility of their citizens. As a result, many migrant workers returned home, spreading the virus across borders. We investigate the relationship between migrant movements and the spread of COVID-19 using district-day-level data from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan (the 1st, 6th, and 7th largest sources of international migrant workers). We find that during the initial stage of the pandemic, a 1 SD increase in prior international out-migration relative to the district-wise average in India and Pakistan predicts a 48% increase in the number of cases per capita. In Bangladesh, however, the estimates are not statistically distinguishable from zero. Domestic out-migration predicts COVID-19 diffusion in India, but not in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In all three countries, the association of COVID-19 cases per capita and measures of international out-migration increases over time. The results show how migration data can be used to predict coronavirus hotspots. More broadly, the results are consistent with large cross-border negative externalities created by policies aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 in migrant-receiving countries.

Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology can reduce inequality by modernizing traditional ways to transfer money. One year later, for active mobile banking users, urban-to-rural remittances increased by 26 percent of the baseline mean. Rural consumption increased by 7.5 percent, and extreme poverty fell. Rural households borrowed less, saved more, sent additional migrants, and consumed more in the lean season. Urban migrants experienced less poverty and saved more but bore costs, reporting worse health.

Even when the economy was humming, before COVID-19 hit, having a steady job didn't guarantee escape from money troubles. At the end of 2019, 16 percent of Americans surveyed by the Federal Reserve reported that they wouldn't be able to cover their bills that month. Another 12 percent were living so close to the financial edge that they couldn't pay their bills if hit by a $400 emergency expense. 

The hardships documented by the Federal Reserve were greatest for Black and Hispanic Americans. Over one-third of Black Americans with a high school degree or less reported not paying their bills fully — nearly double the national average. Low-wage jobs are disproportionately done by women of color, who are consequently far more likely to lack sick leave and healthcare benefits. Such broad and persistent insecurity demands long-term structural solutions. 

But there are also immediate steps that we can take to address these inequalities. In June, a coalition of fifteen mayors — from cities including Seattle, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Newark — came together and identified one key policy priority to address their constituents' most urgent needs: a guaranteed minimum income.

But what form should this guaranteed income take? It's not as obvious as it might seem. Andrew Yang promised Americans $1000 a month if elected. But why $1000? And why every month? 

Unlike previous crises that the microfinance industry weathered successfully, Covid-19 has created significant challenges for both the demand side – low-income borrowers struggling to repay their microloans – and the supply side – providers facing their own funding pressures.

Improve your world. Karlan-Morduch Economics 3e is built around the central concept that economics is a powerful and positive tool that students can use to improve their world. Economics uses examples and issues that resonate with students’ experience to draw them in and frame ideas to help develop their economic intuition. 

Two very different kinds of RCTs are used by economists, although they often get lumped together. The first kind is evaluative, used to assess whether a policy or intervention worked or not. Critics worry that privileging these RCTs over other evaluation methods can narrow knowledge. The second kind of RCT is exploratory, asking how behavior, institutions, and markets react to changing prices, contracts, and other economic features. By disrupting status quo economic conditions through experimental design, these exploratory RCTs open new questions for empirical micro-economics in ways that other methods cannot. One can be ambivalent about putting evaluative RCTs on a pedestal while also encouraging exploratory RCTs. Examples from RCTs of insurance, microcredit and digital money illustrate the arguments.

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens lives and livelihoods, and, with that, has created immediate challenges for institutions that serve affected communities. We focus on implications for local microfinance institutions in Pakistan, a country with a mature microfinance sector, serving a large number of households. The institutions serve populations poorly-served by traditional commercial banks, helping customers invest in microenterprises, save, and maintain liquidity. We report results from ‘rapid response’ phone surveys of about 1,000 microenterprise owners, a survey of about 200 microfinance loan officers, and interviews with regulators and senior representatives of microfinance institutions. We ran these surveys starting about a week after the country went into lockdown to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. We find that, on average, week-on-week sales and household income both fell by about 90 per cent. Households’ primary immediate concern in early April became how to secure food. As a result, 70 per cent of the sample of current microfinance borrowers reported that they could not repay their loans; loan officers anticipated a repayment rate of just 34 per cent in April 2020. We build from the results to argue that COVID-19 represents a crisis for microfinance in low-income communities. It is also a chance to consider the future of microfinance, and we suggest insights for policy reform.

If there was ever an economic debate that randomized controlled trials could help resolve, it seemed to be the debate over the average economic and social impact of microcredit. When the first RCTs were published in 2015, they undermined beliefs in the potential to reduce mass poverty through microcredit, cutting through years of methodological debate. In retrospect, however, the studies reveal challenges in drawing inferences across RCTs. By design, the studies focus on marginal customers and marginal locations. As a result, the RCTs are most interesting and informative on their own terms and in their own idiosyncratic contexts. While it is tempting to interpret the results broadly, the studies were never designed to measure the average impact of microcredit. Ultimately, the RCTs shifted views on the possibilities for expanding microcredit and generated valuable insights, but they also showed that a diversity of methods—from RCTs that explore other margins to ethnography and financial diaries—is required to assess the sector’s overall contributions.

The reality of social investment can be messy. How could it not be? The aim is to support a new sort of capitalist endeavor driven by pursuit of social progress rather than just pursuit of profit. Yet modern history has been shaped by the tensions between unbridled capitalism and struggles for social and economic justice. Microfinance has been a laboratory for these developments, somehow embracing both market denialism and market fundamentalism, showing possibilities, limits, and conundrums. We reflect on four questions central to both “big ideas” and practical action: (1) How do user fees (including prices and interest rates) help and hurt customers and businesses? (2) How worrisome is mission drift, and why does it happen? (3) What is the role of subsidy? (4) How should social returns be measured?

Risk is pervasive in low-income economies, but insurance markets tend to be under-developed and demand for existing products is often low and poorly understood. Usually, customers must buy insurance by making a single lump-sum payment. We study a popular life insurance product sold by Mexico's leading microfinance institution. We exploit a large-scale natural experiment involving 200,000 poor female microcredit customers and show that demand increased by 59–74 percent when customers were allowed to pay in weekly installments instead of in a lump sum, even though doing so was more costly for them. The finding is not explained by price or income, which do not change. We describe the possible roles of liquidity constraints and other explanations, and relate the result to discussions of demand for microinsurance and other products, including merit goods, in similar contexts.

Microfinance is generally seen as a way to fix credit markets and unleash the productive capacities of poor people dependent on self-employment. The microfinance sector grew quickly since the 1990s, paving the way for other forms of social enterprise and social investment. But recent evidence shows only modest average impacts on customers, generating a backlash against microfinance. We reconsider the claims about microfinance, highlighting the diversity in evidence on impacts and the important (but limited) role of subsidy. We conclude by describing an evolution of thinking: from microfinance as narrowly-construed entrepreneurial finance toward microfinance as broadly-construed household finance. In this vision, microfinance yields benefits by providing liquidity for a wide range of needs rather than solely by boosting business income.

Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper calculates the costs of microcredit and other elements of the microcredit business model using proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly serving 80.1 million borrowers. The costs of making small loans to poorer clients are high, and when revenues fall short of costs, subsidies are necessary to deliver services to those clients on a sustainable basis. Using a method that accounts for the opportunity costs of all forms of subsidy, the analysis finds that the median institution receives five cents of subsidy per dollar lent and $51 of subsidy per borrower (in PPP-adjusted terms). Relatively low levels of median subsidy suggest that even modest benefits of microcredit could yield impressive cost-benefit ratios. The distribution of subsidies is highly skewed, however: the average subsidy per dollar lent is 13 cents, and the average subsidy per borrower is $248. The data show that subsidies per borrower are substantially higher for commercial microfinance banks and some non-bank financial institutions that make relatively large loans. MFIs organized as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in contrast, generally rely less on subsidy.

Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the most prestigious of a string of awards celebrating his role in creating banks for the poor. If there was a Nobel for marketing, he could have won that, too. That’s not meant as a jab but as recognition of Yunus’s rhetorical flair. Yunus not only founded a financial institution that serves the poor in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, the 2006 Nobel co-winner), he also crafted a global vision for funding entrepreneurs and tirelessly promoted it for three decades.

But today Yunus’s vision — and the assumptions it rests on — is coming apart. Microfinance has proved fairly robust as a banking idea but not as an anti-poverty intervention.

We use data from the US Financial Diaries study to relate episodic poverty to intrayear income volatility and to the availability of government transfers. The US Financial Diaries data track a continuous year’s worth of month-to-month income for 235 low- and moderate-income households, each with at least one employed member, in four regions in the United States. The data provide an unusually granular view of household financial transactions, allowing the documentation of episodic poverty and the attribution of a large share of it to fluctuations in earnings within jobs. For households with annual income greater than 150 percent of the poverty line, smoothing within-job income variability reduces the incidence of episodic poverty by roughly half. We decompose how month-to-month income volatility responds to the receipt of eight types of public or private transfers. The transfers assist households mainly by raising the mean of income rather than by dampening intrayear income variability.

The ideal of the American Dream seems increasingly out of reach, even for many families who are trying to do everything right. To find out why, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider followed 235 low- and middle-income families as they navigated a year of ups and downs. Through the groundbreaking US Financial Diaries project, we meet real people, from a casino dealer to a street vendor to a tax preparer, who open up their lives and reveal a world of financial uncertainty. For these families, even limited financial success requires imaginative—and often costly—coping strategies: forming saving clubs, borrowing from relatives, strategizing about skipping bills, and devising ways to keep money just out of easy reach. In The Financial Diaries, Morduch and Schneider challenge popular assumptions about how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save. This book uncovers deeper causes of distress and inequality, starkly illustrating how changes in America have placed too much risk on the wrong shoulders. The authors describe new tools and policies—from fin tech apps that help people manage money to laws that guarantee predictable hours—that will improve stability for those who need it most.

Students know that economic change in the real world creates both winners and losers. Economic research today is also very engaged with inequality and its relationship to efficiency and productivity. Introductory economics courses, however, usually focus on efficiency rather than distribution, and normative economics gets short shrift. But rather than devoting more class time to formal normative criteria, concern with distribution can be incorporated with more empirics. Systematically and routinely describing (and sometimes debating) the winners and losers of economic change can bring introductory courses closer to the mainstream of the field and better connect class-time to students’ concerns and experiences.

Economic analyses of household choices usually assume that money is fungible—that a dollar is a dollar, no matter how it was earned or by whom. But, in practice, families often earmark money earned by a particular family member or generated from a particular job. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money thoroughly documents the importance of earmarking and the social relations that explain why and how. More recently, the US Financial Diaries project documents the frequency of earmarking in a sample of low- and moderate-income households in ten sites across America.   Earmarking income for particular purposes generally leads to spending patterns that deviate from patterns delivered by household-level optimization with full fungibility. Not surprisingly, economists have been slow to embrace notions of earmarking.  That, though, may be changing, as behavioral economics and game theory provide examples of how “anomalous” empirical results can open doors to the acceptance of richer theoretical approaches.

We analyze a randomized trial of an innovative anti-poverty program in South India, part of a series of pilot programs that provide “ultra-poor” households with inputs to create new, sustainable livelihoods (often tending livestock). In contrast with results from other pilots, we find no lasting net impact on income or asset accumulation in South India. We explore concerns with program implementation, data errors, and the existence of compelling employment alternatives. The baseline consumption data contain systematic errors, and income and consumption contain large outliers. Steps to address the problems leave the central findings largely intact: Wages for unskilled labor rose sharply in the area while the study was implemented, blunting the net impact of the intervention and highlighting one way that treatment effects depend on factors external to the intervention itself, such as broader employment opportunities.

The US Financial Diaries track the daily finances of low and moderate-income households over a year. The households faced substantial swings in income from month to month. On average, they experienced 2.7 months when income fell more than 25 percent below average, and 2.7 months when income was more than 25 percent above average. The volatility is summarized by an average coefficient of variation of monthly income (within year, averaged across households) of 39 percent. The CV is greatest (55 percent) for households below the poverty line, but the CV remained relatively high (33-35 percent) and steady for households with income from 100 percent of the poverty line up to 300 percent. Thus, in the non-poor sample, greater income did not imply notably greater income stability.

Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer, has proposed that access to credit should be a human right. We approach the question by drawing on fieldwork and empirical scholarship in political science and economics. Evidence shows that access to credit may be powerful for some people some of the time, but it is not powerful for everyone all of the time, and in some cases it can do damage. Yunus’s claim for the power of credit access has yet to be widely verified, and most rigorous studies find microcredit impacts that fall far short of the kinds of empirical assertions on which his proposal rests. We discuss ways that expanding the domain of rights can diminish the power of existing rights, and we argue for a right to non-discrimination in credit access, rather than a right to credit access itself.

This chapter introduces the basics of quantitative impact assessments. The context is microinsurance, but the lessons apply more broadly. The chapter covers seletion bias, control groups, randomization, statistical power, internal validity, and external validity.

We combine two datasets to examine whether the presence of banks affects the profitability and outreach of microfinance institutions.We find evidence that competition matters. Greater bank penetration in the overall economy is associated with microbanks pushing toward poorer markets, as reflected in smaller average loans sizes and greater outreach to women. The evidence is particularly strong for microbanks relying on commercial-funding and using traditional bilateral lending contracts (rather than group lending methods favored by microfinance NGOs). We consider plausible alternative explanations for the correlations, including relationships that run through the nature of the regulatory environment and the structure of the banking environment, but we fail to find strong support for these alternative hypotheses.

We replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts (Pitt and Khandker, 1998). That study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty, a much hoped-for possibility (though one not confirmed by recent randomized controlled trials). We show that the original results on poverty reduction disappear after dropping outliers, or when using a robust linear estimator. Using a new program for estimation of mixed process maximum likelihood models, we show how assumptions critical for the original analysis, such as error normality, are contradicted by the data. We conclude that questions about impact cannot be answered in these data.

Microcredit and SME finance are often pitched as alternative strategies to create employment opportunities in low-income communities. So far, though, little is known about how employment patterns compare. We integrate evidence from three surveys to show that, compared to Bangladeshi microcredit customers, typical SME employees in Bangladesh have more education and professional skills, and live in households that are notably less poor. SME jobs also require long work weeks, clashing with family responsibilities. The evidence from Bangladesh rejects the idea that SME finance more efficiently creates jobs for the population currently served by microcredit.

We use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south India to highlight behavioral features of microcredit, a financial tool designed to reduce poverty and fix credit market imperfections. The evidence suggests that microcredit contracts may do more than reduce moral hazard and adverse selection by imposing new forms of discipline on borrowers. We find that, conditional on borrowing from any source, women with present-biased preferences are more likely than others to borrow through microcredit institutions. Another particular contribution of microcredit may thus be to provide helpful structure for borrowers seeking self-discipline.

“Best practice” in microfinance holds that interest rates should be set at profit-making levels, based on the belief that even poor customers favor access to finance over low fees.  Despite this core belief, little direct evidence exists on the price elasticity of credit demand in poor communities.  We examine increases in the interest rate on microfinance loans in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh.  Using unanticipated between-branch variation in prices, we estimate interest elasticities from -0.73 to -1.04, with our preferred estimate being at the upper end of this range. Interest income earned from most borrowers fell, but interest income earned from the largest customers increased, generating overall profitability at the branch level. 

More than ever, Americans need to be financially savvy. The past few years have shown that mortgages can be complicated, business-cycle downswings severe, and investing far from obvious. And, for many of us, saving is not easy. Creating a successful financial life takes a high level of know-how and stamina. Not surprisingly, efforts to increase financial literacy among Americans have won wide support

How we think about poverty is colored by how we measure it. For economists, that often means seeing poverty through quantities measured in large, representative surveys. The surveys give a comprehensive view, but favor breadth over depth. Typical economic surveys are limited in their ability to tease out informal activity, and, while they capture yearly sums, they offer little about how the year was actually lived by families. Year-long financial diaries provide a complementary way of seeing poverty, with a focus on week by week choices and challenges. The result is a re-framing of poverty and its relationship to money, calling for greater attention to financial access and a broader notion of how finance matters.

At the beginning of 2010, the Indian microfinance sector was a hotspot for impact investors. The promise of impact investing could be seen in the number of investors lining up to participate in the IPO of SKS Microfinance. 

SKS had ballooned from 603,000 borrowers in fiscal year 2007 to 6.8 million in fiscal year 2010.  Most were women in South Indian villages. The founder of SKS, Vikram Akula, had been saluted by Time and the World Economic Forum, and his Harvard-published memoir told the story of an “unexpected quest to end poverty through profitability.” 

But by 2011, the Indian microfinance sector was mired in bad press and political controversy.  Newspapers accused lenders of putting poor villagers in debt and causing suicides. State-level legislation in late 2010 capped interest rates and scared away equity investors.  Borrowers ceased to repay, and SKS’s share price plummeted, dipping below 200 rupees in late August 2011 (from an IPO price of 985 rupees in August 2010). As summer 2011 ended, BASIX—a pioneering competitor of SKS-- very publicly searched for funding to stay afloat.

Both the achievements and challenges in India hold lessons for impact investors. 

Impact investing has been widely touted, with microfinance as a leading example.  The temptation to attract capital by promising macro-impact at a micro-cost is difficult to resist—and India continues to be one of the most important and innovative microfinance markets. But getting the equation right is more complicated than most advocates admit.

Here are seven lessons on challenges, risks and realities drawn from three decades of microfinance ups and downs.

Roughly one-half of the world’s adults, about 2.5 billion people, have neither a bank account nor access to semiformal financial services such as “microcredit,” the growing practice in developing nations of providing small loans, typically less than US$500, to self-employed people. But what if they did? Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, a pioneering microcredit institution, argues that this lack of financial access means that the poor, especially poor women, can’t obtain the loans they need to build their businesses and get on a path out of poverty. The idea has taken hold: In 2009, for instance, Grameen Bank served 8 million customers; its average loan balance was just $127. Worldwide, microcredit advocates now claim more than 190 million customers. Proof of concept, however, is not proof of impact. Recent studies have found that some efforts to provide small loans have produced surprisingly weak results, and in this issue, Karlan and Zinman provide more evidence that we need to rethink microcredit. Their findings, from a randomized evaluation of microcredit lending in the Philippines, adds to a handful of recent results that suggest that microcredit’s effectiveness has been overstated by studies that selectively focus on success stories.

We combine two datasets to examine whether the scale of an economy’s banking system affects the profitability and outreach of microfinance institutions. We find evidence that competition matters. Greater bank penetration in the overall economy is associated with microbanks pushing toward poorer markets, as reflected in smaller average loans sizes and greater outreach to women. The evidence is particularly strong for microbanks that rely on commercial-funding, use traditional bilateral lending contracts (rather than group lending methods favored by microfinance NGOs), and take deposits. We consider plausible alternative explanations for the correlations, including relationships that run through the nature of the regulatory environment and the structure of the banking environment, but we fail to find strong support for these alternative hypotheses.

This paper puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance.  Microfinance aims to democratize global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the roles that government agencies and socially-minded investors play in supporting the entry and expansion of private intermediaries in the sector, and we disentangle debates about competing social and commercial firm goals. We frame the analysis with theory that explains why microfinance institutions serving lower-income communities charge high interest rates, face high costs, monitor customers relatively intensively, and have limited ability to lever assets. The analysis blurs traditional dividing lines between non-profits and for-profits and places focus on the relationship between target market, ownership rights and access to external capital.

Is credit a human right? Muhammad Yunus, the most visible leader of a global movement to provide microcredit to world’s poor, says it should be. NYU’s John Gershman and FAI’s Jonathan Morduch disagree. In their new paper, Credit is Not a Right, they ask whether a rights-based approach to microcredit will in fact be effective in making quality, affordable credit more available to poor families – and, more importantly, whether it is a constructive step in terms of the broader goal of global poverty reduction. Jonathan Morduch argues his case in this video.

Poor families often borrow even when they have savings sufficient to cover the loan. The practice is costly relative to drawing down one’s own savings, and it seems particularly puzzling in poor communities.  The families themselves explain that it is easier to repay a moneylender than to “repay” oneself, an explanation in line with recent findings in behavioral economics.  In this context, high interest rates on loans can help instill discipline.  While workable, the mechanism is hardly optimal; options could be improved through access to a contractual saving device that helps savers rebuild assets after a major withdrawal.

Microfinance banks use group-based lending contracts to strengthen borrowers' incentives for diligence, but the contracts are vulnerable to free-riding and collusion. We systematically unpack microfinance mechanisms through ten experimental games played in an experimental economics laboratory in urban Peru. Risk-taking broadly conforms to theoretical predictions, with dynamic incentives strongly reducing risk-taking even without group-based mechanisms. Group lending increases risk-taking, especially for risk-averse borrowers, but this is moderated when borrowers form their own groups. Group contracts benefit borrowers by creating implicit insurance against investment losses, but the costs are borne by other borrowers, especially the most risk averse. ​

Contents:

1 Rethinking Banking 

2 Why Intervene in Credit Markets? 

3 Roots of Microfinance: ROSCAs and Credit Cooperatives

4 Group Lending

5 Beyond Group Lending

6 Savings and Insurance

7 Gender

8 Commercialization and Regulation

9 Measuring Impacts

10 Subsidy and Sustainability

11 Managing Microfinance 

Answering surveys is usually voluntary, yet much of our knowledge depends on the willingness of households and institutions to answer. In this study, we explore the implications of voluntary reporting on knowledge about microfinance. We show systematic biases in microfinance institutions' choices about which survey to respond to and which specific indicators to report. The analysis focuses on data for 2,072 microfinance institutions from MixMarket and the Microcredit Summit Campaign databases for the years 2004-2006. In general, we find that financial indicators are more often reported than social indicators. The patterns of reporting correlate with the institutions' region of operation, mission, and size. The patterns in turn affect analyses of key questions on trade-offs between financial and social goals in microfinance. For example, the relationship between operational self-sufficiency and the percentage of women borrowers is positive in the Microcredit Summit Campaign data but negative in the MixMarket data. The results highlight the conditional nature of our knowledge and the value of supporting social reporting.

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton University Press, 2009) tackles the fundamental question of how the poor make ends meet. Over 250 families in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa participated in this unprecedented study of the financial practices of the world's poor.

These households were interviewed every two weeks over the course of a year, reporting on their most minute financial transactions. This book shows that many poor people have surprisingly sophisticated financial lives, saving and borrowing with an eye to the future and creating complex "financial portfolios" of formal and informal tools.

Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

Limited information on the size and nature of the global population using financial services limits policy makers’ abilities to identify what’s working and what’s not, and it limits financial services providers’ abilities to identify where the opportunities lie and where they could learn from current successes.

A new report, “Half the world is unbanked,” provides an improved estimate of the size and nature of the global population that does and does not use formal (or semiformal) financial services.

This paper builds on a data set compiled from existing cross-country data sources on financial access and socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to generate an improved estimate of the size and nature of the global population that does and does not use formal (or semiformal) financial services.

About forty percent of the world's people live on incomes of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to explain systematically how the poor find solutions.

The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion."

In this paper, we examine the economic logic behind microfinance institutions and consider the movement from socially oriented nonprofit microfinance institutions to for-profit microfinance. Drawing on a large dataset that includes most of the world's leading microfinance institutions, we explore eight questions about the microfinance "industry": Who are the lenders? How widespread is profitability? Are loans in fact repaid at the high rates advertised? Who are the customers? Why are interest rates so high? Are profits high enough to attract profit-maximizing investors? How important are subsidies? The evidence suggests that investors seeking pure profits would have little interest in most of the institutions we see that are now serving poorer customers. We will suggest that the future of microfinance is unlikely to follow a single path. The recent clash between supporters of profit-driven Banco Compartamos and of the Grameen Bank with its "social business" model offers us a false choice. Commercial investment is necessary to fund the continued expansion of microfinance, but institutions with strong social missions, many taking advantage of subsidies, remain best placed to reach and serve the poorest customers, and some are doing so at a massive scale. The market is a powerful force, but it cannot fill all gaps.

To analyze the prospects for expanding financial access to the poor, bank professionals assessed 1,438 households in six provinces in Indonesia to judge their creditworthiness. About 40 percent of poor households were judged creditworthy according to the criteria of Indonesia's largest microfinance bank, but fewer than 10 percent had recently borrowed from a microbank or formal lender. Possessing collateral appeared as a minor determinant of creditworthiness, in keeping with microfinance innovations. Although these households were judged able to service loans reliably, most desired small loans. Calculations show that the bank, given its current fee structure and banking practices, would lose money when lending at the scales desired. So, while innovations have helped to extend financial access, it remains difficult to lend in small amounts and cover costs.

Written by 1506 eminent contributors, this new edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics retains many classic essays of enduring importance and contains 1,872 articles. Published in eight print volumes and for the first time in online format, this is the definitive scholarly reference work for a new generation of economists.

Microfinance promises to reduce poverty by employing profit-making banking practices in low-income communities. Many microfinance institutions have secured high loan repayment rates but, so far, relatively few earn profits. We examine why this promise remains unmet. We explore patterns of profitability, loan repayment, and cost reduction with unusually high-quality data on 124 institutions in 49 countries. The evidence shows the possibility of earning profits while serving the poor, but a trade-off emerges between profitability and serving the poorest. Raising fees to very high levels does not ensure greater profitability and the benefits of cost-cutting diminish when serving better-off customers.

The microfinance revolution, begun with independent initiatives in Latin America and South Asia starting in the 1970s, has so far allowed 65 million poor people around the world to receive small loans without collateral, build up assets, and buy insurance. This comprehensive survey of microfinance seeks to bridge the gap in the existing literature on microfinance between academic economists and practitioners. Both authors have pursued the subject not only in academia but in the field; Beatriz Armendáriz de Aghion founded a microfinance bank in Chiapas, Mexico, and Jonathan Morduch has done fieldwork in Bangladesh, China, and Indonesia. The authors move beyond the usual theoretical focus in the microfinance literature and draw on new developments in theories of contracts and incentives. They challenge conventional assumptions about how poor households save and build assets and how institutions can overcome market failures. The book provides an overview of microfinance by addressing a range of issues, including lessons from informal markets, savings and insurance, the role of women, the place of subsidies, impact measurement, and management incentives. It integrates theory with empirical data, citing studies from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and introducing ideas about asymmetric information, principal-agent theory, and household decision making in the context of microfinance. The Economics of Microfinance can be used by students in economics, public policy, and development studies. Mathematical notation is used to clarify some arguments, but the main points can be grasped without the math. Each chapter ends with analytically challenging exercises for advanced economics students.

Increasingly international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank are redefining their missions in terms of global public goods provision. Global public goods have benefits that spill across national borders, and priorities include constructing financial architecture, generating and spreading knowledge, peace-keeping, containing disease, and cleaning up the environment. The rhetoric of global public goods underscores the notion that sending foreign aid overseas can deliver benefits at home as well. As in standard analyses of public goods, under-supply can occur due to free-riding, and public action can improve eficiency. But other cases depart from the standard analysis. We consider cases in which the content of global public goods may be controversial, and where welfare may be a function of multiple public goods consumed simultaneously. In this setting, free-riding may be encouraged and strategic policymakers may choose the quality of public goods to either "crowd out" or "crowd in" the provision of other public goods. The formal analysis is illustrated with discussion of two recent initiatives to provide global public goods: the failed proposal to start an Asian Monetary Fund in 1997 and the World Bank's announcement in 1996 that it is becoming a "Knowledge Bank" that spreads information on international development policy.

The microfinance movement has built on innovations in financial intermediation that reduce the costs and risks of lending to poor households. Replications of the movement’s flagship, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, have now spread around the world. While programs aim to bring social and economic benefits to clients, few attempts have been made to quantify benefits rigorously. This paper draws on a new cross-sectional survey of nearly 1800 households, some of which are served by the Grameen Bank and two similar programs, and some of which have no access to programs. Households that are eligible to borrow and have access to the programs do not have notably higher consumption levels than control households, and, for the most part, their children are no more likely to be in school. Men also tend to work harder, and women less. More favorably, relative to controls, households eligible for programs have substantially (and significantly) lower variation in consumption and labor supply across seasons. The most important potential impacts are thus associated with the reduction of vulnerability, not of poverty per se. The consumption-smoothing appears to be driven largely by income-smoothing, not by borrowing and lending.

The evaluation holds lessons for studies of other programs in low-income countries. While it is common to use fixed effects estimators to control for unobservable variables correlated with the placement of programs, using fixed effects estimators can exacerbate biases when, as here, programs target their programs to specific populations within larger communities.

This paper reports on a methodology designed to examine the effects of selected agricultural policies in Hungary. The purpose of the paper is twofold. The first is to explain the methodology, dubbed multi-market analysis in previous work, which is implemented on personal computers to support discussions on policy reforms.

The second is to examine wheat and maize policies in Hungary. While the model is constructed to focus on these policies, it will also be possible to outline ways to use the model to address other problems.