August 31, 2009
IPA partners win Social Performance Reporting Award
Microfinance institutions are often assumed to be socially oriented, but as the industry expands and more institutions enter, it becomes increasingly important to verify these claims. Donors and social investors should require more than a mission statement and a few anecdotes to know whether an MFI is really reaching the poor.
August 31, 2009
Day in the Life
The House on Mango Lane
One of the hardest things about doing research on poverty can be finding people for follow-up visits, especially in urban areas like Accra, Ghana, where I work. As a rule Accra has no helpful signs, street names, or addresses. Directions are based on landmarks, whose defining feature is usually that it's something old -- the types of things that are obvious if you've lived there forever, but make no sense when you're new to the city. The resulting irony is that the most expensive thing about our research can be the time spent finding people to research.
August 24, 2009
Commentary
Why millions of the world’s poor still choose to go private
Why millions of the world´s poor still choose to go private (from The Financial Times)
Even though public school teachers and public doctors tend to be much more qualified (and cheaper to access) than their private sector counterparts, people in the developing world tend to choose the private option.
August 19, 2009
Day in the Life
Amazonian Fashion and a Lack of Financial Services
The bus ride down from La Paz to the Beni in Bolivia is breathtaking, sometimes because the scenery catches you off guard when you round a bend and sometimes because you too vividly imagine the next few seconds of your life as a thousand foot freefall to a rocky riverbed below.
August 19, 2009
Commentary
Times Restaurant Critic on Behavioral Economics
Interesting example of the endowment effect from New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/dining/19note.html?8dpc
Summing up the quirky behaviors of his dining companions over his tenure as restaurant critic for the NY Times, Bruni describes the way his fellow diners--to whom he had randomly assigned dishes to be sampled--would become protective of "their" choices, defending their quality.
August 17, 2009
Commentary
Does it pay for microentrepreneurs to formalize?
The World Bank's Private Sector Development blog discusses the findings of a new study on the informal sector in Bolivia by IPA Research Affiliate David McKenzie:
August 11, 2009
Commentary
Bingo for Africa
IPA field staff are used to using lotteries to determine treatment and control groups for randomized control trials. Some of our Research Affiliates have also used existing government lotteries (visas for migration to New Zealand and school vouchers in Colombia, for example) as natural field experiments.
August 5, 2009
Day in the Life
Freakonomics Blog: Random Lives in Northern Uganda
Check out this post in the New York Times' Freakonomics Blog Dwyer Gunn's time tagging along with the research team for the WINGS project in Uganda.