Jonathan Morduch

Rachel Schneider

Drawing on the groundbreaking U.S. Financial Diaries project (http://www.usfinancialdiaries.org/), which follows the lives of 235 low- and middle-income families as they navigate through a year, the authors challenge popular assumptions about how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save-- and they identify the true causes of distress and inequality for many working Americans.

How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty

The Financial Diaries

Daryl Collins

Stuart Rutherford

Orlanda Ruthven

Nearly forty percent of humanity lives on an average of two dollars a day or less. If you've never had to survive on an income so small, it is hard to imagine. How would you put food on the table, afford a home, and educate your children? How would you handle emergencies and old age? Every day, more than a billion people around the world must answer these questions. Portfolios of the Poor is the first book to systematically explain how the poor find solutions to their everyday financial problems. The authors conducted year-long interviews with impoverished villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available. Their experiences reveal new methods to fight poverty and ways to envision the next generation of banks for the "bottom billion." Indispensable for those in development studies, economics, and microfinance, Portfolios of the Poor will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about poverty and what can be done about it.

How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day

Portfolios of the Poor

Aslı Demirgüç-Kunt

Robert J. Cull

Microfinance contracts have proven able to secure high rates of loan repayment in the face of limited liability and information asymmetries, but high repayment rates have not translated easily into profits for most microbanks. Profitability, though, is at the heart of the promise that microfinance can deliver poverty reduction while not relying on ongoing subsidy. The authors examine why this promise remains unmet for most institutions. Using a data set with unusually high quality financial information on 124 institutions in 49 countries, they explore the patterns of profitability, loan repayment, and cost reduction. The authors find that institutional design and orientation matter substantially. Lenders that do not use group-based methods to overcome incentive problems experience weaker portfolio quality and lower profit rates when interest rates are raised substantially. For these individual-based lenders, one key to achieving profitability is investing more heavily in staff costs-a finding consistent with the economics of information but contrary to the conventional wisdom that profitability is largely a function of minimizing cost.

A Global Analysis of Leading Microbanks

Financial Performance and Outreach

Beatriz Armendariz

The Economics of Microfinance

Dean Karlan

Built from the ground up to focus on what matters to students in today's high-tech, globalized world, Dean Karlan and Jonathan Morduch's Economics represents a new generation of products, optimized for digital delivery and available with the best-in-class adaptive study resources in McGraw-Hill's LearnSmart Advantage Suite. Engagement with real-world problems is built into the very fabric of the learning materials as students are encouraged to think about economics in efficient, innovative, and meaningful ways. Drawing on the authors' experiences as academic economists, teachers, and policy advisors, a familiar curriculum is combined with material from new research and applied areas such as finance, behavioral economics, and the political economy, to share with students how what they're learning really matters. This modern approach is organized around learning objectives and matched with sound assessment tools aimed at enhancing students' analytical and critical thinking competencies. Students and faculty will find content that breaks down barriers between what goes on in the classroom and what is going on in our nation and broader world. By teaching the right questions to ask, Karlan and Morduch provide readers with a method for working through decisions they'll face in life and ultimately show that economics is the common thread that enables us to understand, analyze, and solve problems in our local communities and around the world. Connect is the only integrated learning system that empowers students by continuously adapting to deliver precisely what they need, when they need it, and how they need it, so that your class time is more engaging and effective.

Economics

Mark Melatos

Chris Bajada

eBook for Principles of Economics

Robert Cull

Experts report on the latest research on extending access to financial services to the 2.5 billion adults around the world who lack it. About 2.5 billion adults, just over half the world's adult population, lack bank accounts. If we are to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to this vast "unbanked" population, we need to consider not only such product innovations as microfinance and mobile banking but also issues of data accuracy, impact assessment, risk mitigation, technology adaptation, financial literacy, and local context. In Banking the World, experts take up these topics, reporting on new research that will guide both policy makers and scholars in a broader push to extend financial markets. The contributors consider such topics as the complexity of surveying people about their use of financial services; evidence of the impact of financial services on income; the occasional negative effects of financial services on poor households, including disincentives to work and overindebtedness; and tools for improving access such as nontraditional credit scores, financial incentives for banking, and identification technologies that can dramatically reduce loan default rates.

Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion

Banking the World

Beatriz Armendáriz

"This should be required reading for microfinance friends and foes alike, or anyone wishing to understand what the issues really are." --

Jonathan Morduch

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