Publications
“Living on low-incomes with multiple long-term health conditions: A new method to explore the complex interaction between finance and health.” (with Olga Biosca, Enrico Bellazzecca, Cam Donaldson, Ahalya Bala, Marta Mojarrieta, Gregory White, Neil McHugh, and Rachel Baker.) PLOS One, 2024. People on low-incomes in the UK develop multiple long-term health conditions over 10 years earlier than affluent individuals. Financial diaries -new to public health- are used to explore the lived experiences of financially-vulnerable individuals, diagnosed with at least one long-term condition, living in two inner-city London Boroughs. Findings show that the health status of these individuals is a key barrier to work opportunities, undermining their income. Their precarious and uncertain financial situation, sometimes combined with housing issues, increased stress and anxiety which, in turn, contributed to further deteriorate participants’ health. Long-term health conditions limited the strategies to overcome moments of financial crisis and diarists frequently used credit to cope. Restrictions to access reliable services and timely support were connected to the progression of multiple long-term conditions. Models that integrate healthcare, public health, welfare and financial support are needed to slow down the progression from one to many long-term health conditions.
“The Social Meaning of Mobile Money: Earmarking Reduces the Willingness to Spend in Migrant Households” (with Jean N. Lee, Saravana Ravindran, and Abu S. Shonchoy). Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 221, May 2024: 675-688. Behavioral household finance shows that people are often more willing to spend when using less tangible forms of money like debit cards or digital payments than when spending in cash. We show that this “payment effect” cannot be generalized to mobile money. We surveyed families in rural Northwest Bangladesh, where mobile money is mainly received from relatives working in factories. The surveys were embedded within an experiment that allows us to control for the relationships between senders and receivers of mobile money. The finding suggests that the source of funds matters, and mobile money is earmarked for particular purposes and thus less fungible than cash. In contrast to the expectation of greater spending, the willingness to spend in the rural sample was lower by 24 to 31 percent. In urban areas, where the sample does not receive remittances on net, there are no payment effects associated with mobile money.
“What Win-Win Lost: Rethinking Microfinance Subsidy in the Past and Designing for the Future.” With Timothy Ogden. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 40(1), Spring 2024: 44–53. The modern microfinance industry was built on the idea that lenders could (and should) profit while serving poor and excluded customers. This idea—that lenders could ‘win’ while customers would also ‘win’—inspired the broader field of social enterprise and opened possibilities for business-driven responses to social problems. However, in hindsight it is possible to see that not only was the idea flawed—important claims underpinning the core idea have failed to find empirical support—but the lingering belief that ‘win–win’ was right continues to handicap not only financial inclusion and consumer protection policies, but the social investment and finance industry as a whole. The win–win formulation was driven by the assertion that customers would be indifferent to the level of interest rates on loans and that it was simply access to finance that mattered most to customers. The argument was used to justify charging the highest interest rates to the most operationally expensive customers, who turned out to not coincidentally be the poorest customers. However, studies show that customers are indeed sensitive to interest rates and that high interest rates discourage borrowers. Moreover, despite charging high rates, financial data show that most lenders failed to earn profit after fully accounting for the subsidies received from donors and social investors. Microfinance and the social investment industry it helped spawn remain important tools for addressing poverty and inequality, but both sectors are overdue for a transparent reckoning of the roles of subsidy (including its benefits) and greater recognition of the potential for exclusion caused by high prices and the drive for profitability or ‘sustainability’. Muddled thinking on subsidy and prices handicapped the past but does not need to handicap the future.
Microfinance [A dynamic literature review]. (Jing Cai, Muhammad Meki, Simon Quinn, Erica Field, Cynthia Kinnan, Jonathan Morduch, Jonathan de Quidt, and Farah Said.) VoxDevLit. First version: May 2021. This version: February 2023.
“Rethinking Poverty, Household Finance, and Microfinance.” Chapter 2 in Valentina Hartarska and Robert Cull, eds., Handbook of Microfinance, Financial Inclusion and Development. Edward Elgar, 2023: 21-40. High-frequency data show that the material condition of poverty is created by the interaction of insufficiency × instability × illiquidity. Reducing instability and/or illiquidity can thus reduce exposure to poverty even when average earning power (overall insufficiency) is unchanged. The high-frequency view shows competing needs for smoothing and spiking of spending, alongside competing needs for structure and flexibility in financial products. High-frequency instability also explains why ex post moral hazard (“strategic” default) is a particular problem for lenders and, in turn, why joint liability is difficult to sustain in microfinance. The high-frequency repayment structure of typical microfinance loan contracts is similar to the installment structure of consumer lending products and contractual saving products, explaining how microfinance loans work naturally for purposes other than business investment, despite lenders’ nominal intentions. The high-frequency view helps to show why microfinance loans remain popular despite mixed evidence on average impacts on household income.
A Dialogue on the Future of Microfinance and International Development (with Marc Labie). Mondes en Développement, issue 200. 2023. This dialogue contributes to the 50th anniversary and 200th issue of Mondes en développement (Developing Worlds), the French and Belgian journal founded in 1973 by François Perroux of the Collège de France. To mark the anniversary, we discuss what has been learned about microfinance, which, as a modern movement, is also roughly 50 years old. We discuss how microfinance arose from new views on poverty in the 1970s coupled with fall-0ut from the global debt crisis of the 1980s; how microfinance was promoted; debates over subsidy; changing views of group lending; gender and finance; and whether everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.
Narrowing the Gender Gap in Mobile Banking. (Jean N. Lee, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Abu S. Shonchoy). Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 193, January 2022: 276-293. Mobile banking and related digital financial technologies can make financial services cheaper and more widely accessible in low-income economies, but gender gaps persist. We present evidence from two connected field experiments in Bangladesh designed to encourage the adoption and use of mobile banking by poor, illiterate households. The study focuses on migrants who live in Dhaka and send money back to their extended families. Despite large differences between female and male migrants in income and education, the first experiment shows that a training program led to similarly large, positive impacts on mobile banking use by female migrants (a 51 percentage point increase) and male migrants (46 percentage point increase), substantially narrowing the gender gap. However, the increases in adoption did not lead to similar patterns in usage: men increased digital remittances by 11 times as much as women. A second experiment tests whether introducing the technology in the context of family networks made an additional difference to gender gaps. The evidence suggests an 11 percentage point increase in adoption by women and just a 1 percentage point increase by men, although statistical power is low for this comparison and estimates are imprecise.
Just Give People Money. But How and When? With Rachel Schneider. Chapter for Ray Boshara and Ida Rademacher (eds.), The Future of Building Wealth: Brief Essays on the Best Ideas to Build Wealth—for Everyone. St. Louis Federal Reserve/Aspen Institute. September 2021. Just give people money. The idea is as simple as it is radical. At least it was radical until the coronavirus pandemic. With sluggish wages and household savings eroded by the pandemic, many struggling households simply need cash. Giving cash has turned out to be a powerful policy tool — its use is flexible, and households can spend it on their most pressing needs, whatever those are. But not all money is the same. The amount matters, obviously, but the timing matters too. When you’re threatened with eviction, to take an extreme example, having the right amount of money at the right time can be the difference between maintaining housing and experiencing homelessness. The same amount of money received even a few weeks later might not help. That probably seems obvious, but policies designed to support the finances of American families do not focus much on cash flows and the challenges they create in getting through the month or year. The focus has been instead on building long-term saving, income and wealth. To be successful in the long term, however, households need to be successful in the short term too. Short-term cash flows need more attention.
Rethinking Poverty, Household Finance, and Microfinance. Book chapter in Valentina Hartarska and Robert Cull, eds., Handbook of Microfinance, Financial Inclusion and Development. August 2021. Forthcoming. High-frequency data show that the material condition of poverty is created by the interaction of insufficiency × instability × illiquidity. Reducing instability and/or illiquidity can thus reduce exposure to poverty even when average earning power (overall insufficiency) is unchanged. The high-frequency view shows competing needs for smoothing and spiking of spending, alongside competing needs for structure and flexibility in financial products. High-frequency instability also explains why ex post moral hazard (“strategic” default) is a particular problem for lenders and, in turn, why joint liability is difficult to sustain in microfinance. The high-frequency repayment structure of typical microfinance loan contracts is similar to the installment structure of consumer lending products and contractual saving products, explaining how microfinance loans work naturally for purposes other than business investment, despite lenders’ nominal intentions. The high-frequency view helps to show why microfinance loans remain popular despite mixed evidence on average impacts on household income.
Poverty and migration in the digital age: Experimental evidence on mobile banking in Bangladesh (Jean Lee, Jonathan Morduch, Saravana Ravindran, Abu Shonchoy, and Hassan Zaman). American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2021. Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology can reduce inequality by modernizing traditional ways to transfer money. One year later, for active mobile banking users, urban-to-rural remittances increased by 26 percent of the baseline mean. Rural consumption increased by 7.5 percent, and extreme poverty fell. Rural households borrowed less, saved more, sent additional migrants, and consumed more in the lean season. Urban migrants experienced less poverty and saved more but bore costs, reporting worse health. (Appendix.)
Jonathan Morduch, “The Disruptive Power of RCTs.” In Florent Bédécarrats, Isabelle Guerin, and François Roubaud, eds. Randomized Control Trials in Development: The Gold Standard Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2021.
ABSTRACT: Two very different kinds of RCTs are used by economists, although they often get lumped together. The first kind is evaluative, used to assess whether a policy or intervention worked or not. Critics worry that privileging these RCTs over other evaluation methods can narrow knowledge. The second kind of RCT is exploratory, asking how behavior, institutions, and markets react to changing prices, contracts, and other economic features. By disrupting status quo economic conditions through experimental design, these exploratory RCTs open new questions for empirical micro-economics in ways that other methods cannot. One can be ambivalent about putting evaluative RCTs on a pedestal while also encouraging exploratory RCTs. Examples from RCTs of insurance, microcredit and digital money illustrate the arguments.
Kashif Malik, Muhammad Meki, Jonathan Morduch, Timothy Ogden, Simon Quinn, and Farah Said. 2020. “COVID-19 and the Future of Microfinance: Evidence and Insights from Pakistan.” April. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, April 2020.
ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic threatens lives and livelihoods, and, with that, has created immediate challenges for institutions that serve affected communities. We focus on implications for local microfinance institutions in Pakistan, a country with a mature microfinance sector, serving a large number of households. The institutions serve populations poorly-served by traditional commercial banks, helping customers invest in microenterprises, save, and maintain liquidity. We report results from ‘rapid response’ phone surveys of about 1,000 microenterprise owners, a survey of about 200 microfinance loan officers, and interviews with regulators and senior representatives of microfinance institutions. We ran these surveys starting about a week after the country went into lockdown to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. We find that, on average, week-on-week sales and household income both fell by about90%. Households’primary immediate concern in early April became how to secure food. As a result, 70% of the sample of current microfinance borrowers reported that they could not repay their loans; loan officers anticipated a repayment rate of just 34% in April 2020. We build from the results to argue that COVID-19 represents a crisis for microfinance in low-income communities. It is also a chance to consider the future of microfinance, and we suggest insights for policy reform.
“Why RCTs failed to answer the biggest questions about microcredit impact.” World Development 127, 104818. Special Issue on RCTs. 2020.
ABSTRACT: If there was ever an economic debate that randomized controlled trials could help resolve, it seemed to be the debate over the average economic and social impact of microcredit. When the first RCTs were published in 2015, they undermined beliefs in the potential to reduce mass poverty through microcredit, cutting through years of methodological debate. In retrospect, however, the studies reveal challenges in drawing inferences across RCTs. By design, the studies focus on marginal customers and marginal locations. As a result, the RCTs are most interesting and informative on their own terms and in their own idiosyncratic contexts. While it is tempting to interpret the results broadly, the studies were never designed to measure the average impact of microcredit. Ultimately, the RCTs shifted views on the possibilities for expanding microcredit and generated valuable insights, but they also showed that a diversity of methods—from RCTs that explore other margins to ethnography and financial diaries—is required to assess the sector’s overall contributions.
Jonathan Bauchet and Jonathan Morduch. 2019. “Paying in Pieces: A natural experiment on consumer demand under different payment schemes.” Journal of Development Economics 139 (2019): 69-77.
ABSTRACT: Risk is pervasive in low-income economies, but insurance markets tend to be under-developed and demand for existing products is often low and poorly understood. Usually, customers must buy insurance by making a single lump-sum payment. We study a popular life insurance product sold by Mexico’s leading microfinance institution. We exploit a large-scale natural experiment involving 200,000 poor female microcredit customers and show that demand increased by 59 to 74 percent when customers were allowed to pay in weekly installments instead of in a lump sum, even though doing so was more costly for them. The finding is not explained by price or income, which do not change. We describe the possible roles of liquidity constraints and other explanations, and relate the result to discussions of demand for microinsurance and other products, including merit goods, in similar contexts.
Jonathan Morduch and Timothy Ogden. 2019. “The Challenges of Social Investment through the Lens of Microfinance.” Chapter 1 in Marek Hudon, Marc Labie, and Ariane Szafarz (eds.), A Research Agenda for Financial Inclusion and Microfinance. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 12-26.
ABSTRACT: The reality of social investment can be messy. How could it not be? The aim is to support a new sort of capitalist endeavor driven by pursuit of social progress rather than just pursuit of profit. Yet modern history has been shaped by the tensions between unbridled capitalism and struggles for social and economic justice. Microfinance has been a laboratory for these developments, somehow embracing both market denialism and market fundamentalism, showing possibilities, limits, and conundrums. We reflect on four questions central to both “big ideas” and practical action: (1) How do user fees (including prices and interest rates) help and hurt customers and businesses? (2) How worrisome is mission drift, and why does it happen? (3) What is the role of subsidy? (4) How should social returns be measured?
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. 2018. “The Microfinance Business Model: Enduring Subsidy and Modest Profit.” World Bank Economic Review 32 (2): 221-244. Blog post.
ABSTRACT: Recent evidence suggests only modest social and economic impacts of microfinance. Favorable cost-benefit ratios then depend on low costs. This paper calculates the costs of microcredit and other elements of the microcredit business model using proprietary data on 1,335 microfinance institutions between 2005 and 2009, jointly serving 80.1 million borrowers. The costs of making small loans to poorer clients are high, and when revenues fall short of costs, subsidies are necessary to deliver services to those clients on a sustainable basis. Using a method that accounts for the opportunity costs of all forms of subsidy, the analysis finds that the median institution receives five cents of subsidy per dollar lent and $51 of subsidy per borrower (in PPP-adjusted terms). Relatively low levels of median subsidy suggest that even modest benefits of microcredit could yield impressive cost-benefit ratios. The distribution of subsidies is highly skewed, however: the average subsidy per dollar lent is 13 cents, and the average subsidy per borrower is $248. The data show that subsidies per borrower are substantially higher for commercial microfinance banks and some non-bank financial institutions that make relatively large loans. MFIs organized as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in contrast, generally rely less on subsidy.
Robert Cull and Jonathan Morduch. 2018. “Microfinance and Economic Development,” Chapter 20 in Thorsten Beck and Ross Levine (eds.), Handbook of Finance and Development. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 550-572.
ABSTRACT: Microfinance is generally seen as a way to fix credit markets and unleash the productive capacities of poor people dependent on self-employment. The microfinance sector grew quickly since the 1990s, paving the way for other forms of social enterprise and social investment. But recent evidence shows only modest average impacts on customers, generating a backlash against microfinance. We reconsider the claims about microfinance, highlighting the diversity in evidence on impacts and the important (but limited) role of subsidy. We conclude by describing an evolution of thinking: from microfinance as narrowly-construed entrepreneurial finance toward microfinance as broadly-construed household finance. In this vision, microfinance yields benefits by providing liquidity for a wide range of needs rather than solely by boosting business income.
Jonathan Morduch and Julie Siwicki. 2017. “In and Out of Poverty: Poverty spells and income volatility in the U.S. Financial Diaries.” Social Service Review 91 (3): September 2017: 390-421.
ABSTRACT: We use data from the U.S. Financial Diaries study to relate episodic poverty to intra-year income volatility and to the availability of government transfers. The U.S. Financial Diaries data track a continuous year’s worth of month-to-month income for 235 low- and moderate-income households, each with at least one employed member, in four regions in the United States. The data provide an unusually granular view of household financial transactions, allowing the documentation of episodic poverty, and the attribution of a large share of it to fluctuations in earnings within jobs. For households with annual income greater than 150 percent of the poverty line, smoothing within-job income variability reduces the incidence of episodic poverty by roughly half. We decompose how month-to-month income volatility responds to receipt of eight types of public or private transfers. The transfers assist households mainly by raising the mean of income rather than by dampening intra-year income variability.
Jonathan Morduch. “Economics and the Social Meaning of Money,” chapter 1 in Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana Zelizer, eds., Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2017.
ABSTRACT: Economic analyses of household choices usually assume that money is fungible—that a dollar is a dollar, no matter how it was earned or by whom. But, in practice, families often earmark money earned by a particular family member or generated from a particular job. Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money thoroughly documents the importance of earmarking and the social relations that explain why and how. More recently, the US Financial Diaries project documents the
frequency of earmarking in a sample of low- and moderate-income households in ten sites across America. Earmarking income for particular purposes generally leads to spending patterns that deviate from patterns delivered by household-level optimization with full fungibility. Not surprisingly, economists have been slow to embrace notions of earmarking. That, though, may be changing, as behavioral economics and game theory provide examples of how “anomalous” empirical results can open doors to the acceptance of richer theoretical approaches.
Jonathan Morduch and Tim Ogden. “Interview with Jonathan Morduch” [on the interpretation and methodology of RCTs in development economics] in Timothy Ogden, ed., Experimental Conversations. MIT Press, 2017.
Anthony Hannagan and Jonathan Morduch. “Income Gains and Month-to-Month Income Volatility: Evidence from the US Financial Diaries.” In Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities & the Economy. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2016.
Jonathan Bauchet, Jonathan Morduch, and Shamika Ravi. “Failure vs Displacement: Why an innovative anti-poverty program showed no net impact in South India.” Journal of Development Economics 116, September 2015: 1-16.
John Gershman and Jonathan Morduch. “Credit is not a right.”In Microfinance, Rights, and Global Justice, Tom Sorell and Luis Cabrera, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. “Banks and Microbanks.” Journal of Financial Services Research 46 (1), August 2014: 1-53.
David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch. “The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence.” Journal of Development Studies 50 (4), April 2014: 583-604. [Appendix.] [Drafts, code, data, more.]
ABSTRACT: We replicate and reanalyze the most influential study of microcredit impacts (Pitt and Khandker, 1998). That study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty, a much hoped-for possibility (though one not confirmed by recent randomized controlled trials). We show that the original results on poverty reduction disappear after dropping outliers, or when using a robust linear estimator. Using a new program for estimation of mixed process maximum likelihood models, we show how assumptions critical for the original analysis, such as error normality, are contradicted by the data. We conclude that questions about impact cannot be answered in these data.
Jonathan Bauchet, Aparna Dalal, and Jonathan Morduch. “What Can We Learn from Impact Assessments?” Chapter 4 in Practical Guide to Impact Assessments of Microinsurance. Edited by Ralf Rademacher and Katja Roth. Microinsurance Network. 2014.
Jonathan Bauchet and Jonathan Morduch. “Is Micro too Small? Microcredit vs. SME Finance.” 2013. World Development 43: 288-297.
Beatriz Armendáriz, Yu Luo, and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance in China.” In Economics of Microfinance, Chinese edition. China Social Sciences Press, Beijing; 2nd edition: Liangjing Publishing House, Beijing. 2013.
Jonathan Morduch. “10 Research Questions”, chapter 15 (conclusion) in Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch, editors, Banking the World. MIT Press, 2013.
Alberto Chaia, Aparna Dalal, Tony Goland, Maria Jose Gonzalez, Jonathan Morduch, and Robert Schiff. “Half the World is Unbanked” Chapter 2 in Robert Cull, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch, editors, Banking the World. MIT Press, 2013. Featured in McKinsey Quarterly, 2010.
Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, and Jonathan Morduch. “Behavioral Foundations of Microcredit: Experimental and Survey Evidence from Rural India.” American Economic Review 102 (2), April 2012: 1118-1139.
ABSTRACT: We 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 microcredit contracts may do more than reduce moral hazard and adverse selection by imposing new forms of discipline on borrowers. We find that, conditional on borrowing from any source, women with present-biased preferences are more likely than others to borrow through microcredit institutions. Another particular contribution of microcredit may thus be to provide helpful structure for borrowers seeking self-discipline.
Rajeev Dehejia, Heather Montgomery, and Jonathan Morduch. “Do interest rates matter? Credit demand in the Dhaka Slums.” Journal of Development Economics 47 (2), March 2012: 437 – 499.
ABSTRACT: “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 elasticity of credit demand in poor communities. We examine increases in the interest rate on microfinance loans in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using unanticipated between-branch variation in prices, we estimate interest elasticities from − 0.73 to − 1.04, with our preferred estimate being at the upper end of this range. Interest income earned from most borrowers fell, but interest income earned from the largest increased, generating overall profitability at the branch level.
Aparna Dalal and Jonathan Morduch. “The Psychology of Microinsurance: Small Changes Can Make a Surprising Difference.” Chapter 13 in Craig Churchill and Michal Matul, eds., Protecting the Poor: A Microinsurance Compendium, Volume II. Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2012, pp. 274-285.
Jonathan Conning and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance and Social Investment.” Annual Review of Financial Economics, vol. 3, ed. Robert Merton and Andrew Lo. 2011: 407-434.
ABSTRACT: This review puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance. Microfinance aims to democratize global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the roles that government agencies and socially minded investors play in supporting the entry and expansion of private intermediaries in the sector, and we disentangle debates about competing social and commercial firm goals. We frame the analysis with theory that explains why microfinance institutions serving lower-income communities charge high interest rates, face high costs, monitor customers relatively intensively, and have limited ability to lever assets. The analysis blurs traditional dividing lines between nonprofits and for-profits and places focus on the relationship between target market, ownership rights, and access to external capital.
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. “Does Regulatory Supervision Curtail Microfinance Profitability and Outreach?” World Development 39(6): 949-965, June 2011.
Jonathan Morduch. “Does Microfinance Really Help the Poor? New Evidence on Flagship Programs in Bangladesh,” Chapter 12 in S. R. Osmani and M. A. Baqui Kalily, Readings in Microfinance: Reach and Impact. Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press Limited, 2011, pp. 323-349. (Publication of an unpublished June 1998 discussion paper).
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. “Microfinance Tradeoffs: Regulation, Competition, and Financing.” In Beatriz Armendáriz and Marc Labie, eds., Handbook of Microfinance. World Scientific, 2010, pp. 141-157. [Japanese translation 2016]
Jonathan Morduch. “Borrowing to Save.” Journal of Globalization and Development 102 (2), December 2010.
Xavier Gine, Pamela Jakiela, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance Games.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2(3): 60-95, July 2010.
Jonathan Bauchet and Jonathan Morduch. “Selective Knowledge: Reporting Bias in Microfinance Data.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 9 (3-4): 240-269, 2010.
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. “Microfinance Meets the Market.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23(1), Winter 2009: 167-192.
Reprinted as ch. 1 of Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis, Volume 92, Moving Beyond Storytelling: Emerging Research in Microfinance, Todd A. Watkins and Karen Hicks (eds.). 2009. Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Dean Karlan and Jonathan Morduch. “Access to Finance.” In Dani Rodrik and Mark Rosenzweig, eds., Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 5. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009, pp. 4704 – 4784.
Jonathan Morduch. “The Knowledge Bank,” chapter 13 in Reinventing Foreign Aid, edited by William Easterly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 377-397.
Don Johnston Jr. and Jonathan Morduch. “The Unbanked: Evidence from Indonesia.”October 2008. World Bank Economic Review 22 (3): 517-537.
Jonathan Morduch. “Micro-credit.” In New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume, eds. Second Edition. Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.
Daryl Collins and Jonathan Morduch. “Banking Low-Income Populations: Perspectives from South Africa.” In Rebecca Blank and Michael S. Barr, eds., Insufficient Funds: Savings, Assets, Credit and Banking Among Low-Income Households. New York: Russell Sage, 2008.
Condensed version published as “Reimagining the Unbanked: Perspectives from South Africa” (with Daryl Collins) in Communities and Banking, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Spring 2010, pp. 22-23.
Robert Cull, Jonathan Morduch, and Asli Demirgüç-Kunt. “Financial Performance and Outreach: A Global Analysis of Leading Microbanks.” Economic Journal, February 2007, Vol. 117, Issue 517: F107-F133.
Jonathan Morduch. “Smart Subsidy,” chapter 5 in Bernd Balkenhol, ed., Microfinance and Public Policy. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007, pp. 72-85.
Reprinted in French as “Les subventions intelligentes” (Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).
Updated and translated into Spanish, in Microfinanzas y Políticas Públicas, (Plaza y Valdes and ILO).
Jonathan Morduch. “Micro-insurance: The Next Revolution?” in Understanding Poverty, edited by Abhijit Banerjee, Roland Benabou, and Dilip Mookherjee. Oxford University Press, 2006: 337-356.
Jonathan Morduch. “Concepts of Poverty.” Chapter 2 of United Nations Handbook of Poverty Statistics. New York: United Nations, 2008.
Jonathan Morduch. “Poverty Measures,” Chapter 3 of United Nations Handbook of Poverty Statistics. New York: United Nations, 2008.
Beatriz Armendàriz and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance: Where do we stand?” Invited presentation at the 2003 Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Chapter in Charles Goodhart, editor, Financial Development and Economic Growth: Explaining the Links. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Jonathan Morduch and Stuart Rutherford. “Microfinance: Analytical issues for India.” April 2003. In Priya Basu, ed., India‘s Financial Sector: Issues, Challenges and Policy Options. Oxford University Press.
Barbara Haley and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance and Poverty Reduction: What is the Bottom Line?” (In French) in Exclusion et Liens Financiers. 2003.
Jonathan Morduch. “Consumption Smoothing Across Space: Tests for Village-Level Responses to Risk.”In Stefan Dercon, ed., Insurance Against Poverty, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Gisele Kamanou and Jonathan Morduch. “Measuring vulnerability to poverty.” In Stefan Dercon, ed., Insurance Against Poverty, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Mark Schreiner and Jonathan Morduch. “Replicating Microfinance in the United States: Opportunities and Challenges.” Chapter 1 of Replicating Microfinance in the United States, edited by Jim Carr and Zhong Yi Tong. Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Jonathan Morduch and Manohar Sharma. “Strengthening Safety Nets from the Bottom Up.”Development Policy Review, 2002. Prepared for World Bank Institute, December 2000. Also available in the World Bank Social Safety Nets Primer, and as a Human Development Network Social Protection Unit (HDNCP) working paper (www.worldbank.org/poverty/safety). In translation as “Redes de seguridad, seguro informal y Microfinanzas” and “Renforcement des filets sociaux de sécurité publics à partir de la base” (Paper No. 0227)
Jonathan Morduch and Terry Sicular. “Rethinking Inequality Decomposition, with Evidence from Rural China.” Economic Journal 112 (476), January 2002, 93-106.
Jonathan Morduch and Terry Sicular. “Risk and Insurance in Transition: Perspectives from Zouping County, China.” Chapter 8 in Community and Market in Economic Development, Oxford University Press, edited by Professors Masahiko Aoki and Yujiro Hayami. 2001.
Jonathan Morduch. “Reforming Poverty Alleviation Policies,” presented at conference on “Economic Policy Reform: What We Know and What We Need to Know” held at Stanford University, September 1998. Published in Economic Policy Reform: The Second Stage, edited by Professor Anne Krueger, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Beatriz Armendàriz and Jonathan Morduch. “Microfinance Beyond Group Lending.” The Economics of Transition 8 (2) 2000: 401 – 420.
Jonathan Morduch. “Sibling Rivalry in Africa,” American Economic Review (AEA Papers and Proceedings) 90 (2), May 2000, 405 – 409.
Jonathan Morduch and Terry Sicular. “Politics, Growth, and Inequality in Rural China: Does it Pay to Join the Party?” (with Terry Sicular). Journal of Public Economics 77 (3), September 2000, 331 – 356.
Jonathan Morduch. “The Microfinance Promise,” Journal of Economic Literature 37 (4), December 1999, 1569 – 1614.
Reprinted in Gerald Meier and James Rauch, Leading Issues in Development Economics, 8th edition, 2006. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jonathan Morduch. “The Role of Subsidies in Microfinance: Evidence from The Grameen Bank,” Journal of Development Economics 60, October 1999, 229 – 248.
Jonathan Morduch. “Between the Market and State: Can Informal Insurance Patch the Safety Net?” World Bank Research Observer 14 (2), August 1999, 187 – 207.
Sudhir Anand and Jonathan Morduch. “Poverty and the `Population Problem’.” Revision of Address at International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Congress, Florence, Italy, March 1995. In Population and Poverty in Developing Countries, Massimo Livi-Bacci and Gustavo de Santis, eds., Oxford University (Clarendon) Press, 1999.
Jonathan Morduch. “The Microfinance Schism,” October 1998. World Development 28 (4), April 2000, 617 – 629.
Reprinted as ch. 3 of Microfinance: A Reader. David Hulme and Thankom Arun, eds. Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge. 2009.
ABSTRACT: Leading advocates for microfinance have put forward an enticing “win-win” proposition: microfinance institutions that follow the principles of good banking will also be those that alleviate the most poverty. This vision forms the core of widely-circulated “best practices,” but as a general proposition the vision is fully supported neither by logic nor by the available empirical evidence. Recognizing the limits to the win-win proposition is an important step toward reaching a more constructive dialogue between microfinance advocates that privilege financial development and those that privilege social impacts.
Ashish Garg and Jonathan Morduch. “Sibling Rivalry and the Gender Gap: Evidence from Child Health Outcomes in Ghana.” Journal of Population Economics 11 (4), December 1998, 471 – 493.
Jonathan Morduch. “Poverty, Economic Growth, and Average Exit Time,” Economics Letters 59, 1998, 385-390.
Featured in Economic Intuition (July 1998) as one of the “best 100 articles annually” in management, finance, and economics.
David Bravo, Ricardo Godoy, and Jonathan Morduch. “Technological Adoption in Rural Cochabamba, Bolivia” (with ), Journal of Anthropological Research 54, Fall 1998, 351 – 371.
Hal Stern and Jonathan Morduch. “Using Mixture Models to Detect Sex Bias in Health Outcomes in Bangladesh.” Journal of Econometrics 77 (1), March 1997, 259 – 276.
ABSTRACT: Many interesting economic hypotheses entail differences in behaviors of groups within a population, but analyses of pooled samples shed only partial light on underlying segmentations. Finite mixture models are considered as an alternative to methods based on pooling. Robustness checks using t-regressions and a Bayesian analogue to the likelihood ratio test for model evaluation are developed. The methodology is used to investigate pro-son bias in child health outcomes in Bangladesh. While regression analysis on the entire sample appears to wash out evidence of bias, the mixture models reveal systematic girl-boy differences in health outcomes.
Jonathan Morduch. “Income Smoothing and Consumption Smoothing,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9(3), Summer 1995, 103 – 114.
Reprinted in Development Economics: Critical Concepts in Development Studies (Routledge Major Works series). Lead article, Volume II.
Reprinted in Chris Barrett, ed., Agricultural Development: Critical Concepts in Development Studies. Routledge 2011.
Peter Klibanoff and Jonathan Morduch. “Decentralization, Externalities, and Efficiency.” Review of Economic Studies 62, April 1995, 223 – 247.
ABSTRACT: In the competitive model, externalities lead to inefficiencies, and inefficiencies increase with the size of externalities. However, as argued by Coase, these problems may be mitigated in a decentralized system through voluntary coordination. We show how coordination is limited by the combination of two factors: respect for individual autonomy and the existence of private information. Together they imply that efficient outcomes can only be achieved through coordination when external effects are relatively large. Moreover, there are instances in which coordination cannot yield any improvement at all, despite common knowledge that social gains from agreement exist. This occurs when external effects are relatively small, and this may help to explain why coordination is so seldom observed in practice. When improvements are possible, we describe how simple subsidies can be used to implement second-best solutions and explain why standard solutions, such as Pigovian taxes, cannot be used. Possible extensions to issues arising in the structure of research joint ventures, assumptions in the endogenous growth literature, and the location of environmental hazards are also described.
Jonathan Morduch. “Poverty and Vulnerability.” American Economic Review (AEA Papers and Proceedings) 84 (2), May 1994, 221 – 225.
Karen Brooks, Jonathan Morduch, and Yakov Urinson. “Distributional Consequences of the Russian Price Reform.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 42:3, April 1994, 469 – 484.
Jonathan Morduch and Alan M. Taylor. “A Model of Price Liberalization in Russia” in The Economics of Transformation: Theory and Practice in the New Market Economies, eds. A. Schipke and A. Taylor (Berlin, New York: Springer, 1993).
Avishay Braverman, Jeffrey S. Hammer, and Jonathan Morduch. “Wheat and Maize Price Policies in Hungary: Tradeoffs between Foreign Exchange and Government Revenue.” Agricultural Economics 1, 1987.
Unpublished papers
“Risk, Production, and Saving: Theory and Evidence from Indian Households.” 1999.