IPA founder and President Dean Karlan lends insight to a discussion on why donations have been sluggish to Pakistan flood appeals

"Sudden events seem to generate more funds. A flood (and droughts) happen gradually and build. There isn't any one single day in which news is huge. For the same reason, this pushes the story away from the media spotlight. But massive and sudden earthquakes or tsunamis draw our immediate attention and shock us." for full article click here

IPA Research Network Member Mushfiq Mobarak was quoted in a recent article on the growing Bangladeshi garment industry. His own research on the impact that garment factory job opportunities have on women in Bangladesh was profiled in a subsequent article. 

Mr. Mobarak, a Bangladeshi who has advised his country's government, found that the presence of apparel jobs appears to bolster school enrollments of girls, especially for young girls.

"A doubling of garment jobs causes a 6.71 percent increase in the probability that a 5-year-old girl is in school," Mr. Mobarak writes in a summary of his findings.

IPA Researcher Chris Blattman's evaluation of an intervention aimed at Street Youth in Liberia is covered by the BBC's The World program. 

Listen to the audio here, including interviews with Liberia Country Director Tricia Gonwa and Professor Blattman.

"So you're asking: How does somebody recover from being conscripted and having to kill their family members. And I think recover is the wrong word. You don't... Recovering is not the goal. It's like when people ask me, so, how is alleviating poverty? How's that going? You have to actually narrow it down to something very specific that you want to achieve. For example, today, these kids, they're very poor. But today I want them to be able eat two meals, or I want them to be able to sleep under a roof and I know a way to make that happen."

Economists Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan lend their insight to a discussion of a radical proposal: a market for immigration visas. 

IPA Research Affiliate Abhijit Banerjee writes of the importance of taking evidence seriously. 

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously.

Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical scepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible.

What it does mean is being very conscious of the quality of evidence, about the danger of naively interpreting the patterns that we see in the world.

In an Op-Ed column this weekend, Nicholas Kristof highlights the crucial role of expenditures on small luxuries in the economic lives of the poor.  He cites work by IPA Research Affiliates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo on the spending habits of the poor.  More recent work by those researchers (and co-authors Rachel Glennerster and Cynthia Kinnan) highlighted the fact that access to microcredit helped some cut back on so-called "temptation goods" like alcohol, gambling and tobacco, perhaps in order to accumulate the savings to start a business.

Esther Duflo's TED talk, "Social Experiments to Fight Poverty" is now available online! 

MIT economist Esther Duflo PhD ‘99, whose influential research has prompted new ways of fighting poverty around the globe, was named winner today of the John Bates Clark medal. Duflo is the second woman to be given the award, which ranks below only the Nobel Prize in prestige within the economics profession and is considered a reliable indicator of future Nobel consideration (about 40 percent of past recipients have won a Nobel).

A New York Time article asks, What is the "fair" interest rate for microloans?

The fracas over preserving the field’s saintly aura centers on the question of how much interest and profit is acceptable, and what constitutes exploitation. The noisy interest rate fight has even attracted Congressional scrutiny, with the House Financial Services Committee holding hearings this year focused in part on whether some microcredit institutions are scamming the poor.

IPA Research Affiliate Abhijit Banerjee writes on the effects of reserving parliamentary seats for women.

"The most important reason why we should want reservations may, therefore, be that they help shake people out of their ignorant prejudices against women in politics and open the way for the country to draw upon a much bigger pool of political talent"

In this Op-Ed, IPA Research Affiliate Jonathan Zinman, writing with Victor Stango, draws on research findings to make suggestions for the role of the Consumer Protection Agency in the United States.  Zinman praises, as an example, the promise of the Social Security Administration's research and development work on financial literacy. This work includes the launch of the Center for Financial Literacy at Boston College, of which IPA is an active partner.

IPA Research Affiliate Abhijit Banerjee discusses the problem (and opportunity) of climate change for the poor. 

"Moreover, it is possible that the poor realise that they are the ones who will pay if the climate really changes drastically - after all, they are the ones who will not be able to shift to Switzerland or wherever things happen to be better."

Research on the efficacy of commitment contracts to quit smoking by IPA Research Affiliates Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman is mentioned in a Newsweek article about how public policy tools can be used to fight heart disease.

An article on re-thinking the strategies that will improve education in the developing world mentions work by Karthik Muralidharan, an IPA Research Affiliate. 

"When schools are poorly run, studying what is wrong is the most vital subject of all."

IPA Research Affiliate Abhijit Banerjee was awarded the Infosys Science Foundation's achievement award for his ground-breaking research in economic theories of development.

Work on the impact of savings in Kenya by IPA Research Affiliates Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson is mentioned in this article on the importance of saving in the developing world.  Nicholas Kristof continues the discussion on his blog.

In Kenya, two economists conducted an experiment by paying the fees to open bank accounts for small peddlers. They found that the peddlers who took up the accounts, especially women, enjoyed remarkable gains. Within six months, they were investing 40 percent more in their businesses, typically by buying more goods to be resold.

Nicholas Kristof names Deworm the World, an initiative in which IPA is a prominent partner,  as a great idea for a charitable holiday gift.

IPA President Dean Karlan and Project Associate Kareem Haggag discuss the findings of research on matching grants in charitable giving:

Many foundations and non-profits run campaigns to increase public awareness of a particular issue and to motivate donations. Recently, some foundations have also begun thinking of their donations as a catalyst enabling a non-profit to raise even more funds from other donors. Similarly, non-profits often approach foundations seeking a gift that they can use to motivate other givers.

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Foreign Policy Magazine has released their "first annual" Top 100 Global Thinkers, and IPA Research Affiliate Esther Duflo has made the list.  She is recognized "for adding quantitative rigor to assessments of foreign aid."

Profiles the research and results of IPA Research Affiliates and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, discussing results from work by Abhijit Banerjee, Rachel Glennerster, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Michael Kremer, Edward Miguel, and Karthik Muralidharan.

Nicholas Kristof mentions the effectiveness of deworming, based on a study by IPA Research Affiliates, in a discussion of changing attitudes towards foreign aid. 

From the article: "Take education. Given the problems with school-building programs, donors have turned to other strategies to increase the number of students, and these are often much more cost-effective: (1) Deworm children. This costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces absenteeism from anemia, sickness and malnutrition. A Kenya study found, in effect, that it is only one twenty-fifth as expensive to increase school attendance by deworming students as by constructing schools."

An estimated 2.2 million children under the age of 5 die from diarrheal diseases each year, according to the World Health Organization. Most of these diseases are thought to be preventable with improvements in sanitation, water quality, and hygiene. 

The grant will be used to study the effectiveness of small scale improvements in sanitation that could have big impacts.  Trials will occur in Bangladesh and in Kenya, where IPA Research Affiliate Michael Kremer will lead the research.

Read more about the grant in the full press release here.

IPA Research Affiliate David McKenzie co-authors an article debunking some common myths about the flow of skilled workers from poor home countries to wealthy ones.  Read the full article here. 

Innovations for Poverty Action will join a number of other active partners to complete the goals of the newly formed Center for Financial Literacy at Boston College.  The CFL's mission is to produce educational materials and programs that help people make reasonable financial decisions throughout their working lives and into retirement.

Read more here.

This Boston Globe article cites a paper by IPA president Dean Karlan and Research Affiliate Jonathan Zinman as well as a paper by IPA Research Affiliates Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Rachel Glennerster (with co-author Cynthia Kinnan) in its discussion of the impact of microfinance.

From the article:

"'Microcredit is not a transformational panacea that is going to lift people out of poverty,' says Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale and a co-author of one of the studies. 'There might be little pockets here and there of people who are made better off, but the average effect is weak, if not nonexistent.'”

"'I don't see this as a negative finding,' she [Duflo] says. When asked why she thinks microcredit didn't boost health and education outcomes, she says, 'I would really ask the question, ‘Why did we expect all these things to happen?' If you give people access to a financial instrument, it's like any other instrument. It's useful, but it's not like the miracle drug to end poverty.'"

Read the full article here.

IPA Research Affiliate Eldar Shafir discusses the book "Insufficient Funds: Savings, Assets, Credit and Banking Among Low-Income Households."  Research by Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, another IPA Research Affiliate, is featured in the book.

Entering the current discussion on predatory lending is a study by JPAL member, Marianne Bertrand, that investigates whether better information on a payday loan's terms influences the decision to borrow.  The article also cites research by IPA affiliates Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir and mentions the work of Jonathan Zinnman and Dean Karlan in this field.

IPA Research Affiliate  Sendhil Mullainathan appeared as a witness in the recent Senate Banking Committee meeting “Creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency: A Cornerstone of America’s New Economic Foundation”.

For more information and to watch the hearing live, click here (Mullainathan appears in the video at minute 151:45).

Coupling business training with microloans is a practice that is growing in popularity.  This article cites an IPA study in Peru led by Dean Karlan and Martin Valdivia which found that the business training program improved outcomes for borrowers and surprisingly had a larger effect for those that expressed less interest in training at the outset of the program.

Research Affiliate Esther Duflo writes about the benefits of keeping girls in school and how IPA's Ghana Secondary School Project for Girls works.  

How betting on yourself to accomplish a personal goal is helping some Britons shed pounds.

Article explores how the power of conformity, or social norms can be harnessed to move a population to change behaviors and choices.  It highlights how the new adiministration is drawing on research by IPA affiliated behavioral economists to craft policies designed to create postive change in people's choices; such as in how much energy they consume, how much they save, as well as how much they chose to smoke and eat fatty foods.

FAI and IPA request your participation in a short survey of institutions that offer or plan to offer credit life insurance. The survey is designed to support research on the design, demand, and use of credit life insurance around the world in order to assist in the development of these products.If your institution offers or plans to offer credit life insurance, please participate in the survey - it should take less than 15 minutes.

Thomas Bossuroy and Clara Delavallade describe how school-based deworming programs dramatically improve child health and education at a low cost.

Esther Duflo answers questions on poverty reduction. She gives examples from several different countries and points you to the original articles by a who's who of the new generation of development economists.

Abhijit Banerjee  and colleagues studied  the delivery of government-sponsored primary education and primary health programmes in Udaipur, Rajasthan and came to some shocking conclusions.

Dean Karlan speaks to American Public Media's Marketplace about microfinance and the potential for creativity to make big impacts on poverty. The trick is to delineate between what sounds good and what really works.

In Kenya, Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer found that keeping girls in school was more effective in reducing girls' risky behavior than teaching the standard HIV curriculum. Moreover, alerting girls to the higher HIV rate among older men dropped the rate of teen births with these older fathers by a stunning 65 percent.

Related Projects:
HIV/AIDS and Education in Western Kenya: A Biomarker Follow-up
HIV/AIDS Prevention Education in Primary Schools in Kenya

Cessation of smoking research conducted in the Philippines by Xavier Gine, Dean Karlan and Jon Zinman discussed in the NYTimes Freakonomics blog.

Related Projects:
The Impact of CARES Commitment Savings for Smoking Cessation in the Philippines

Charitable giving experiment by Dean Karlan and John List finds that the conventional wisdom about matching donations was only partly right.

Related Projects:
Effect of Matching Ratios on Charitable Giving in the United States

Esther Duflo wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India. She and colleague Rema Hanna tested the use of cameras to monitor teacher attendance (and salary incentives based on attendance records), and it worked.

Related Projects:
Encouraging Teacher Attendance through Monitoring with Cameras in Rural India

Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman designed and conducted a field experiment in South Africa to determine the impact of consumer credit on marginal groups. They also looked into whether lenders are pursuing optimal, profit-maximizing
lending strategies.

Related Projects:
Estimating the Impact of Small Consumer Loans on the Working Poor in South Africa

Charge 80% per year on a loan in the U.S. and you're called a usurer. Charge 80% per year on a loan in Latin America or Africa and you can be a poverty-alleviation charity. IPA examines whether poor consumers are better off when they can borrow from regulated financial institutions, even at "excessive" rates.

Related Projects:
Estimating the Impact of Small Consumer Loans on the Working Poor in South Africa

Esther Duflo was recently named by Forbes Magazine as one of the "Ten People Who Could Change the World."

Dean Karlan named as one of 13 young economists doing work that is both highly respected among experts and relevant to the rest of us.

At a time when millions of people each year are still being infected with the virus that causes AIDS, particularly in Africa, a rigorous new study has identified several simple, inexpensive methods that helped reduce the spread of the disease among Kenyan teenagers, especially girls.

Related Projects:
HIV/AIDS Prevention Education in Primary Schools in Kenya
HIV/AIDS and Education in Western Kenya: A Biomarker Follow-up

By revealing how actual consumers respond to real-world situations, field experiments in economics can shed new light on fundamental questions in economic theory.

Related Projects:
Marketing Effects in a Consumer Credit Market in South Africa