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Publication
What’s the Worst That Can Happen? Social Media Protocols and PoliciesTimely updates, increased citizen engagement, and more effective marketing are just a few of the reasons transportation agencies have already started to adopt social media networking tools. Best Practices for Transportation Agency Use of Social Media …
Publication
The Microfinance Business Model: Enduring Subsidy and Modest ProfitRecent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. We use proprietary data on 1335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly serving 80.1 million …
Publication
"What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Worker Knowledge and Retirement Decision-Making"This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and …
Publication
Is Retirement Being Remade? Developments in Labor Market Patterns at Older AgesThis chapter investigates non-traditional work and retirement patterns among older individuals in the Health and Retirement Study. It first reviews the evidence on retirements that initially involve bridge jobs or some form of partial retirement. It then …
Publication
Social Media in Disaster Preparation, Response, and RecoverySocial media have become an essential source of information before, during, and after disasters. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr—instantaneous, far-reaching, and interactive— have become the convergence point for a range of information …
Publication
A Cascade of Failures: Why Government Fails, and How to Stop ItIn this research paper, Paul C. Light writes that the “first step in preventing future failures is to find a reasonable set of past failures that might yield lessons for repair.” To meet this goal, Light asks four key questions about past federal …
Publication
Getting Started with Open Data, A Guide for Transportation AgenciesGetting Started with Open Data is a guide for transportation agencies that would like to release their schedule data and administrative records to the public, and need an introduction to the practice. This guide is intended to result in streamlined use of …
Publication
Urban Mobility in the 21st CenturyBetween 2010 and 2050, the number of people living in the world’s urban areas is expected to grow by 80 percent – from 3.5 billion to 6.3 billion. This growth will pose great challenges for urban mobility – for the networks of transportation facilities …
Publication
Health Care Reform in France - The Birth of State-Led Managed CareThe World Health Organization recently ranked the French health care system the best in the world.1 Although the methods and data on which this assessment was based have been criticized, there are good grounds for being impressed by the French system. Yet …
Publication
“Factors Affecting the Introduction of New Vaccines to Poor Nations: A Comparative Study of the Haemophilus influenza Type B and Hepatitis B Vaccines.”A major effort to introduce new vaccines into poor nations of the world was initiated in recent years with the help of the GAVI alliance. The first vaccines introduced have been the Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) and the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccines. …
Publication
Three-Part HarmonyThis is a commentary to an article in Public Administration Review about Danish public service employee motivation. The piece that we commented on noted that there are two dimensions for how Danish public service employees can choose to do their work, and …
Publication
The Economics of Microfinance, 2nd editionContents: 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 …
Publication
Not so Fast: The Realities of Impact InvestingAt 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 …
Publication
Microfinance GamesMicrofinance 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 …
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Why Finance MattersRoughly 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 …
Publication
Notre façon de voir la pauvreté [How we see poverty]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 …
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Borrowing to SavePoor 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 …
Publication
Does Regulatory Supervision Curtail Microfinance Profitability and Outreach?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 …
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Do interest rates matter? Credit demand in the Dhaka Slums“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 …
Publication
Behavioral Foundations of Microcredit: Experimental and Survey Evidence from Rural IndiaWe 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 …
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Is Micro Too Small? Microcredit vs. SME FinanceMicrocredit 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 …
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How States Stand to Gain or Lose Federal Funds by Opting In or Out of the Medicaid ExpansionFollowing the Supreme Court's decision in 2012, state officials are now deciding whether to expand their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act. While the states' costs of participating in the Medicaid expansion have been at the forefront of this …