Enterprising Psychometrics and Poverty Reduction

As the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals draws near, one of the most critical--global poverty reduction--remains at best a work in progress. But as emerging markets beckon millions of aspiring business owners to set up shop, age-old barriers to funding prevent them from getting started. One answer lies in psychometrics, which enables lenders to assess applicants' potential for success in developing their enterprises when traditional credit applications fall short.

Enterprising Psychometrics and Poverty Reduction sets out in accessible detail this innovative approach to risk evaluation, which uses methods similar to psychometric tools used in corporate hiring. The book evaluates this approach in six financial organizations in Kenya, Colombia, Peru, and South Africa, with extensive charts and tables breaking down each program's profitability and effectiveness. Especially by eliminating disparities that prevent women from accessing credit, this assistance fuels long-range economic growth and general well-being. This concise volume:

• Explains the psychometric approach to credit and its methodologies.
• Identifies core characteristics shared by successful small business owners.
• Outlines a novel approach to credit scoring models for small businesses.
• Reviews the relevant literature on personality and personality testing.
• Features representative success stories.

• Discusses implications for implementing psychometric loan technologies in banks worldwide, and its potential relationship to training programs. Enterprising Psychometrics and Poverty Reduction offers message and methods to professionals and researchers in psychology, economics, development, and finance, especially those involved in global development, the psychology of poverty reduction, banking in emerging markets, and NGOs.

Auteur

Bailey Klinger is CEO & co-founder of the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the original co-inventor of the EFL technology, and has led both the research and business initiatives to bring that technology to the market. His previous research has centered on entrepreneurship, structural transformation, and private sector growth in developing countries, and he has been published in leading Journals such as Science and the Journal of the Economics of Transition. Bailey has performed extensive field research throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia, and consulted for the World Bank, United Nations and Inter-American Development Bank as well as various other national governments and international organizations. Bailey has a Masters in Public Administration in International Development from the Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Asim Khwaja is co-founder of EFL and Chairman of the Board. He is also professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His areas if interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research has been published in the leading economics journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has received coverage media outlets such as the Economist, NY Times, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. Asim received BS degrees in economics and mathematics with computer science from MIT and PhD in economics from Harvard.

Carlos del Carpio is Head of Analytics in EFL's Lima office, responsible for data quality control, analysis, and model building. Prior to joining EFL, Carlos worked for the largest commercial bank in Perú where he developed credit risk models for corporate clients using a variety of credit scoring technologies. Carlos has research experience in credit and market risk modeling, as well specialized training in financialeconomics and applied econometrics. He holds a B.A. in economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Résumé
This book uses newly collected data with nearly 2000 observations across Africa and Latin America of SME owner/operators to examine if psychometric tools can distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. This book fully describes the development problem and how psychometric tools can help solve it. Moreover, it presents and develops the unique statistical methodologies to deploy psychometric tools for credit screening. This will be the single complete publication of the work to date by the entrepreneurial finance lab, created by Klinger & Khwaja. This work started as a research project at Harvard University's center for international development, with funding from Google.org. This work is very high profile, winning the G-20 SME Finance Challenge in 2010 (global open competition to identify the best scalable solutions to unlocking SME finance- winners honored at the G-20 summit in Seoul Korea and receiving significant funding from G-20 countries for the implementation of their models).

Contenu
Innovations in Poverty Reduction: An Introduction.- The Development Problem.- A Psychology-Enabled Solution to small and medium-sized enterprise finance.- Methodology.- Results and Discussions.