Jeffrey A. Flory

B.A.: 2000 Reed College
M.S.: 2009 University of Maryland

Development Economics, Experimental Economics,                       Rural Finance & Risk, Household Food Security

 My research in developing economies revolves around microfinance and risk management, food sufficiency, gender, and experimental economics in village settings. My work in developed economies focuses on competition incentives, gender differences, and behavioral economics. I have experience in rural areas of Africa, India, Mexico, and China; and I speak French, Spanish, and Chinese. Prior to my graduate studies, I worked as a business and economics journalist in China. My undergraduate work focused on socio-cultural and economic changes of pre-modern societies in response to encounters with modern institutions.

My thesis exploits a unique micro dataset that uses a natural field experiment to examine an increasingly salient crossroads in the developing world: the interaction of formal financial market institutions with indigenous institutions for insurance and social safety nets. Specifically, I examine the effect of financial services penetration into rural areas of Central Malawi on inter-household assistance for highly vulnerable households – those who are themselves too poor to make use of expanded financial markets. The analysis, based on 8 months of field-work over 2 years, uses a randomly assigned inducement I helped design in order to identify causal impacts, while a module I added to the end-line survey provides detailed data on inter-household wealth-flows. I find several interesting complementarities between local informal support systems for the highly vulnerable and modern financial markets. In particular, local formal savings adoption raises assistance receipts by the non service-using ultra-poor, channeling more wealth to worse-off households during periods of hunger. This increase in aid-receipts by the worst-off improves several dimensions of food security and health outcomes. Despite the popularity of microfinance in development policy, almost nothing is known about its indirect effects on those who remain too poor to use its services. My research helps fill this gap.

Click Here