Much ado about something: response to Haughton's reply to Duvendack and Palmer-Jones

PRIFPRI3; ISIDSG

High Noon for Microfinance Impact Evaluations: Re-investigating the Evidence from Bangladesh

Recently, microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified the microfinance phenomenon. This paper applies propensity score matching (PSM), which has become widely used for the analysis of observational data, to the study by Pitt and Khandker (1998) which has been labelled the most rigorous evidence supporting claims that microfinance benefits the poorest especially when targeted on women. After carefully reconstructing the data we differentiate outcomes by gender of borrower, take account of borrowing from several formal and informal sources, and find that the mainly positive impacts of microfinance that we observe are shown by sensitivity analysis to be highly vulnerable to selection on unobservables, and we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal.Microfinance; impact evaluation; Bangladesh; propensity score matching; sensitivity analysis

Archives Use of Social Media to Develop Connections with Family Historians

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a research project designed to investigate how social media is being used by archives to develop connections with family historians. This research used qualitative methodology and utilised Skype and Instant Messaging to conduct semi-structured interviews with participants from six archives. The research uses Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory as a framework. The research found the interviewees were using social media in various combinations to serve different purposes. In the majority of cases these tools were being used to achieve maximum access to the wider online community. The study highlights issues and concerns discussed by participants when using social media. There were limited examples of social media use to make connections with family historians during the study. Nonetheless this paper provides three detailed instances of its use to illustrate how archives can make these connections

What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people?

The concept of microcredit was first introduced in Bangladesh by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Professor Yunus started Grameen Bank (GB) more than 30 years ago with the aim of reducing poverty by providing small loans to the country’s rural poor (Yunus 1999). Microcredit has evolved over the years and does not only provide credit to the poor, but also now spans a myriad of other services including savings, insurance, remittances and non-financial services such as financial literacy training and skills development programmes; microcredit is now referred to as microfinance (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010). A key feature of microfinance has been the targeting of women on the grounds that, compared to men, they perform better as clients of microfinance institutions and that their participation has more desirable development outcomes (Pitt and Khandker 1998). Despite the apparent success and popularity of microfinance, no clear evidence yet exists that microfinance programmes have positive impacts (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010; and many others). There have been four major reviews examining impacts of microfinance (Sebstad and Chen, 1996; Gaile and Foster 1996, Goldberg 2005, Odell 2010, see also Orso 2011). These reviews concluded that, while anecdotes and other inspiring stories (such as Todd 1996) purported to show that microfinance can make a real difference in the lives of those served, rigorous quantitative evidence on the nature, magnitude and balance of microfinance impact is still scarce and inconclusive (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, 2010). Overall, it is widely acknowledged that no well-known study robustly shows any strong impacts of microfinance (Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005, p199-230). Because of the growth of the microfinance industry and the attention the sector has received from policy makers, donors and private investors in recent years, existing microfinance impact evaluations need to be re-investigated; the robustness of claims that microfinance successfully alleviates poverty and empowers women must be scrutinised more carefully. Hence, this review revisits the evidence of microfinance evaluations focusing on the technical challenges of conducting rigorous microfinance impact evaluations

What Is Meant by “Replication” and Why Does It Encounter Resistance in Economics?

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates are relatively low. We then consider obstacles to undertaking replication studies and highlight replication initiatives in psychology and political science, behind which economics appears to lag

Comment on: Abou-Ali, H., El-Azony, H., El-Laithy, H., Haughton, J. and Khandker, S., 2010. Evaluating the impact of Egyptian Social Fund for Development Programmes. Journal of Development Effectiveness, 2 (4), 521–555

PRIFPRI3; ISIDG

Ten-Year Secular Changes in Selected Health and Fitness Parameters of 10-11 Years Old Swansea School Children – 2003-2013

Purpose: The aim of this study was to highlight the secular changes in selected health and fitness measures (body mass index, prevalence of overweight and obesity and grip strength) in 10-11 year old Swansea school children, using data obtained in 2003 and 2013.Methods: Stature, body mass and grip strength data were collected for 512 participants (n= 230 boys, n= 282 girls) in 2003 during a Crucial CrewDay and for 414 participants (n= 198 boys, n= 216 girls) in 2013 during the Swan-Linx programme. BMIs were calculated from this data and used to calculate BMI standard deviation scores. A two-way ANOVA was conducted to examine if there was a statistically significant difference in BMI z-score by gender and year of testing. A two-way ANCOVA was used to investigate if there were differences on grip strength by gender and year of testing, with BMI z-score as a covariate.Results: BMI z-scores decreased significantly (p = 0.001) between 2003 and 2013 for both boys (0.80 to 0.40) and girls (0.58 to 0.41). Prevalence of overweight and obesity decreased for both boys and girls from 31.7% to 23.8% and 33.8% to 29.7%, respectively. After BMI z-scores adjustment, grip strength decreased significantly for boys (18.43kg to 16.88kg, p < 0.001), but not for girls (16.53kg to 16.59kg).Conclusion: The study shows promising results in terms of BMI z-scores and prevalence of overweight and obesity. However, the prevalence of overweight and obesity recorded in 2013 is still high, therefore further decreases in prevalence should continue to be an aim. The study also shows that muscular strength, in boys in particular, should be a focus for future interventions regarding physical fitness, in addition to an area for further investigation

Extreme wet conditions coincident with Bronze Age abandonment of upland areas in Britain

Abandonment of farming systems on upland areas in southwest Britain during the Late Bronze Age – some 3000 years ago – is widely considered a ‘classic’ demonstration of the impact of deteriorating climate on the vulnerability of populations in such marginal environments. Here we test the hypothesis that climate change drove the abandonment of upland areas by developing new chronologies for human activity on upland areas during the Bronze Age across southwest Britain (Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin Moor). We find Bronze Age activity in these areas spanned 3900–2950 calendar years ago with abandonment by 2900 calendar years ago. Holocene Irish bog and lake oak tree populations provide evidence of major shifts in hydroclimate across western Britain and Ireland, coincident with ice rafted debris layers recognized in North Atlantic marine sediments, indicating significant changes in the latitude and intensity of zonal atmospheric circulation across the region. We observe abandonment of upland areas in southwest Britain coinciding with a sustained period of extreme wet conditions that commenced 3100 calendar years ago. Our results are consistent with the view that climate change increased the vulnerability of these early farming communities and led to a less intensive use of such marginal environments across Britain

The New Zealand Kauri (Agathis Australis) Research Project: A Radiocarbon Dating Intercomparison of Younger Dryas Wood and Implications for IntCal13

We describe here the New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) Younger Dryas (YD) research project, which aims to undertake Δ14C analysis of ~140 decadal floating wood samples spanning the time interval ~13.1–11.7 kyr cal BP. We report 14C intercomparison measurements being undertaken by the carbon dating laboratories at University of Waikato (Wk), University of California at Irvine (UCI), and University of Oxford (OxA). The Wk, UCI, and OxA laboratories show very good agreement with an interlaboratory comparison of 12 successive decadal kauri samples (average offsets from consensus values of –7 to +4 14C yr). A University of Waikato/University of Heidelberg (HD) intercomparison involving measurement of the YD-age Swiss larch tree Ollon505, shows a HD/Wk offset of ~10–20 14C yr (HD younger), and strong evidence that the positioning of the Ollon505 series is incorrect, with a recommendation that the 14C analyses be removed from the IntCal calibration database

What Is Meant by “Replication” and Why Does It Encounter Resistance in Economics?

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates are relatively low. We then consider obstacles to undertaking replication studies and highlight replication initiatives in psychology and political science, behind which economics appears to lag