Tag Archives: Microcredit

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action IPA’s Peace and Recovery initiative, led on the academic side by Chris, has an open call for funding. We define peace and recovery pretty broadly:Reducing violence and promoting peaceReducing “fragility” (i.e. fostering state capability and institutions of decision-making)Preventing, coping with, and recovering from crises (focusing on conflict, but also including non-conflict humanitarian crises), It also funds a variety of types...

(From the video at the end of the post)Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Oxfam releases a report around the same time as Davos every year on who owns what portion of global wealth. Their spin on it is designed to make headlines, but Dylan Matthews explains why it’s really hard to measure.Also in Vox, Stephanie Wykstra provides a nice plain-language summary of what the research says about microloans. A very cool very cross randomized experiment (more than 50...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.  A slight, shy, balding, 49-year-old when the 1980 Nobel was announced, Cronin was relieved when the university sent Larry Arbeiter to his home at 7 a.m. to help him handle the deluge of requests for press interviews. Arbeiter, a writer in the university’s press office, suggested that Cronin satisfy all the interview requests at once by holding a 10 a.m. news conference. ”Oh,” Cronin insisted, ”I can’t do it then. I’ve got a 10...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. If you can get past me at the beginning, this Planet Money episode The Poop Cartels (Apple/iTunes link), I think shows the power of good econ theory put into practice. Molly Lipscomb of the University of Virginia explains how she, with Laura Schechter, and a big research team in Senegal tried to introduce what some people have also called the “Uber for Poop.” Peter Biar Ajak is a former Sudanese “lost boy” who went on to train...

This paper was published by Latin American Policy last year, co-authored by my ex-student Carlos Schönerwald Silva. From the abstract: Several political and academic circles have considered microfinance to be an important tool to promote economic development and the reduction of poverty. It became a worldwide phenomenon, and the practice disseminated in many developing countries such as Brazil. Even as many authors sing the praises of microfinance—in particular the success in developing...