On June 24, 2011, IPA’s US Household Finance Initiative convened its inaugural working group meeting in New York City. This meeting brought together academics, financial institutions, nonprofits, policymakers and members of the private sector to discuss the direction of IPA’s new Financial Products Innovation Fund and to highlight needs and opportunities for innovative financial product development.
In a recent lecture at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Esther Duflo makes the point that aid is a relatively small proportion of all the money being spent on the poor in the world. She makes the case for thinking of spending by private donors and donor governments as like venture capitalism - an investment in finding what out works. Each dollar can then be multiplied substantially if what works can then be taken up by governments on a very large scale.
In a recent article in Science, Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman find that small loans in the Philippines helped households manage risk, but did nothing for business growth, and actually seemed to reduce subjective wellbeing.
The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation recently secured funding for the next four years, enough to immunise more than a quarter of a billion children in developing countries. This is estimated to save more than 4 million lives by 2015, which is clearly fantastic news. Vaccines are an incredibly cost effective way of improving and saving lives.
David McKenzie presents the results from a poll amongst young development economists, who were asked about what they view as the most under-researched area in development:
The media attention surrounding the release of More Than Good Intentions and Poor Economics has led to a few criticisms of RCTs cropping up around the interwebs:
Arvind Subramanian worries about the macroeconomic effects of aid, something not addressed by RCTs.
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. I recently applied to transition from my current position on the Rainwater Storage Device evaluation in Kamwenge to a new IPA project in Kampala. The project is a little different than the traditional line of work for IPA, namely rigorous impact evaluations, instead we plan to work with NGOs to support and improve upon their Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) systems. Two weeks ago I got the new job, last weekend was spent looking for an apartment in Kampala, and the past four days were spent running around Kamwenge putting thin
The Boston Review recently hosted a forum beginning with the article “Small Changes, Big Results” by Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer. The forum featured seven responses, each focusing on a different concern, though as Glennerster and Kremer later noted, “One of the themes of the responses is that randomized evaluati
More good stuff from the World Bank's Development Impact blog: David McKenzie has a brilliant 'rant' on the external validity double standard, where people are more likely to fault randomized trials for illuminating only a particular context.
