Most Popular Books by Jonathan Morduch

"Helping to reduce venerability poses a new set of challenges for public policy. A starting point is understanding the ways that communities and extended families try to cope with difficulties in the absence of public interventions. Coping mechanisms range from the informal exchange of transfers and loans within families and communities to more structured institutions that enable an entire community to provide protections to their neediest members. this paper describes ways to build public safety nets to complement and extend informal and private institutions. The most effective policies will combine both transfer systems that are sensitive to existing mechanisms and new institutions for providing insurance and for generating savings."--Leaf [2].

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This paper describes important trade-offs that microfinance practitioners, donors, and regulators navigate. Drawing evidence from large, global surveys of microfinance institutions, the authors find a basic tension between meeting social goals and maximizing financial performance. For example, non-profit microfinance institutions make far smaller loans on average and serve more women as a fraction of customers than do commercialized microfinance banks, but their costs per dollar lent are also much higher. Potential trade-offs therefore arise when selecting contracting mechanisms, level of commercialization, rigor of regulation, and the extent of competition. Meaningful interventions in microfinance will require making deliberate choices - and thus embracing and weighing tradeoffs carefully.

When capital and labor markets are imperfect, choice sets narrow, and parents must choose how to ration available funds and time between their children. One consequence is that children become rivals for household resources. In economies with pro-male bias, such rivalries can yield gains to having relatively more sisters than brothers. Using a rich household survey from Ghana, we find that on average if children had all sisters (and no brothers) they would do roughly 25-40% better on measured health indicators than if they had all brothers (and no sisters). The effects are as large as typical quantity-quality trade-offs, and they do not differ significantly by gender.

Effective altruists wish to do good while optimizing the social performance they deliver. We apply this principle to the labor market. We determine the optimal occupational choice of a socially motivated worker who has two mutually exclusive options: a job with a for-profit firm and a lower-paid job with a nonprofit. We construct a model in which a worker motivated only by pure altruism will work at a relatively high wage for the for-profit firm and then make charitable contributions to the nonprofit; this represents the “earning to give” option. By contrast, the occupational choice of a worker sensitive to warm glow (“impure altruism”) depends on her income level. While the presence of “warm glow” feelings would seem to clearly benefit charitable organizations, we show that impure altruism can create distortions in labor market choices. In some cases, warm glow feelings may push the worker to take a job with the nonprofit, even when it is not optimal for the nonprofit.