Rachel Strohm

Dean Karlan & Jonathan Zinman have quantified something most field researchers in the developing world probably sensed already – that respondents are often very sensitive to social perceptions around “undesirable” activities such as borrowing.  In South Africa, they found that roughly 47% of known borrowers at a microcredit bank told surveyors they had not borrowed, with women being more likely to lie than men, and especially more likely to lie to male surveyors than female.  (The surveyors had no connection with the bank, and thus no independent knowledge of the correct answer for a given respondent.)

This is the eternal question at the heart of field research – what do you do if self-reported data isn’t accurate, but it is all you have?  And how does one incentivize truth-telling?  An interesting corollary to this experiment would have been to tell a subset of respondents that the surveyors knew they belonged to the bank (without giving the surveyors any other personal information about respondents’ accounts), and measure how the mere mention of the lending institution changed respondents’ rate of truthful reporting.  How would this work in situations where there is legitimately no authority with credible information on respondents, like measuring landholding in situations where land tenure is totally informal?  Would this be too destructive to surveyor impartiality (and general research ethics) to be an option?  The more I delve into these complicated questions of survey design, the more I find them strangely fascinating.

I promised Asif Dowla some time ago that I would blog about some of his work, and after digging myself out from a fair deal of work that accumulated whilst I was focusing on grad school applications, I finally read his interesting 2005 article on how Grameen Bank built social capital among its members. Dowla identifies three components of social capital – trust, norms, and social networks – and what primarily fascinated me from an institutional perspective was how the norms & networks of rural Bangladesh played into Grameen’s search to build vertical trust between bank & clients.  Women’s access to finance seems to be a less contentious issue in Bangladeshi microfinance today, given the country’s relatively high penetration of microfinancial services, but at the outset Grameen had to work carefully around purdah norms and women’s correspondingly limited social networks in order to convince potential clients that it was a serious partner.  As religious restrictions on gender and public space are less pronounced in most of Africa, I had previously thought of trust-building as more a matter of demonstrating reliability and transparency of services, as Portfolios of the Poor observes.  It’s interesting to see the creation of institutional trust explicitly embedded in a local context like this.  (On a related note, I was surprised to learn that Bangladesh has more microfinance borrowers than all of Africa and Latin America combined.  They’ve come a long way.)

Naturally, all of this put me in mind of Tim Harford’s hugely insightful article on the importance of institutional trust for economic growth.   Dowla has a good section on how building non-kin-group networks through group lending was an important effect of Grameen’s work in the Bangladeshi context, but he also hints at the limits of building a financial system on personal trust when he observes that joint liability within groups seemed to be enforced more by staff than by other group members.  This makes sense on the face of it, when one thinks about the conflicting incentives any group member might have to force another member to cover a missed loan payment.  On the one hand, predicating continued access to credit on full and timely group repayment is a powerful incentive to force payment, but on the other hand, clients might want to be given some leeway themselves if they miss a payment in the future – or might not want to act as hostile enforcers towards people they’ll continue to see around the neighborhood.  This is mere speculation, of course, but it does point to the advantages of shifting loan enforcement duties from a situation governed by personal trust to one governed by institutional trust.  I think it would be a good sign if Grameen’s groups had naturally drifted towards this arrangement.

Finally, my favorite phrase?  The poorest of the poor often have “a short radius of trust … because trust [must be] enforceable by the threat of retaliation.”

I have to say that I really enjoy academic literature reviews – so many insights in so little space!  An excellent recent find was Stefano DellaVigna’s “Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field,” which is more or less a short treatise on how to think about and test hypotheses in behavioral economics.  Whilst some of the points covered were essentially quantifications of easily observable phenomena (such as hyperbolic discounting), there were two that struck me in their phrasing and their implications for microfinance:

• Attention is a scarce resource. This makes intuitive sense, but I found it a pithy description of a fact that we too often neglect when trying to communicate with others.  Another good insight was that “consumer inattention to non-transparent [costs] is substantial.”  This to say that we tend to anchor our purchasing behavior on the costs that are most prominent, or even literally visible to us.  For instance, most US shoppers do fully understand that sales & excise taxes will be added on to the final cost of their grocery purchases – but researchers found that listing the (unchanged) tax visibly on an item’s price tag decreased consumer uptake of that item.
• Choice avoidance is real. I’ll just quote: “Marianne Bertrand et al. (forthcoming) examine the impact of a small or large menu set in the context of a field experiment on the mailing of 50,000 loan offers in South Africa. The authors randomize, among other things, the format of the table illustrating the use of the loan. The small-table format lists only one loan size as an example, while the big-table format presents four different loan sizes. The finding is consistent with the choice avoidance results. The take-up in the small-table format is .6 percentage points larger compared to a baseline of 8 percentage points, an effect size equivalent to a reduction of the (monthly) interest rate by 2.3 percentage points.”

Both of these points made me think about striking a balance in microfinance marketing.  On the one hand, it’s clearly preferable to phrase information in ways that are transparent (no invisible costs) and understandable to clients (so probably discussing interest as a fee rather than an annualized percentage).  On the other hand, however, it’s also important not to overwhelm potential clients with information – especially those for whom microfinance is a first, and likely intimidating, foray into the formal financial system.  So the responsible MFI must figure out – what aspects of their products are clients really paying attention to?  And how do you tell people about them in a way that’s transparent, but also compelling?

I think there’s an obscure parallel here to David Roodman’s recent post on microfinance as institution building – namely, that doing better sales, marketing, client outreach, whatever you’d like to call it is a step towards building commercially viable financial systems for the average residents of developing countries.  A large part of this is that product design is at the heart of marketing, and, as Portfolios of the Poor amply demonstrated, microlending could use a revolution or ten in the design of its products.  But I also partly feel like an attention to marketing – to why microfinance clients take or refuse the loans that they do – would indicate that the financial sector is starting to take the poor seriously as financial decision-makers, as valid and valued clients of a non-exclusionary financial system.  That’s what I’d really like to see.