About me Miguel Almunia 1st year Econ PhD student Project Associate ( ) at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Peru Worked mostly for Dean Karlan (Yale)

The experiment Health Education for Microfinance Clients Sample: ~2000 group lenders in the Peruvian jungle – 70% women – Mostly low (some middle) income – Average education ~ 6 th grade completed Treatment: – min. health education session after each monthly payment meeting – Conducted by loan officers of the MFI (no specific health training)

Feasibility Bias Ideal experiment vs. Actual (feasible) experiment – Initial idea: evaluate health education in different regions, and both group and individual-lending Constraints: – Only one location (budget and logistics…) – Only group-lending clients Impact on external validity?

Feasibility Bias (cont.) Policy relevance of the experiment: – Why not evaluate impact of microfinance itself on living standards? Difficult to find a “pure” control group (other MFIs) Low power to identify modest impacts What metrics do we use to measure living standards?

Implementation Issues What if treatment is not applied properly? – Some loan officers started skipping sessions Dilemma: do we want to evaluate a “perfect” or a “realistic” implementation? – The first is better for academic success… – BUT which one is more relevant for policy?

Incentive Alignment Research team expects Partner organization to implement the program in a certain way – Extra work for the organization – Extra pay? Benefits of the findings of the experiment become a public good – The partner organization gets only a fraction of the value it generated with implementation