Rethinking Poverty and Microcredit
The Yunus Initiative on Extreme Deprivation at the Institute of International Economic Policy invites you to
Rethinking Poverty and Microcredit
Monday, March 2 | 5:30pm ET
Lindner Family Commons (6th Floor)
Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E Street NW, Washington, DC
In-Person Registration Virtual Registration
Join us for “Rethinking Poverty and Microcredit,” a presentation on the use of microcredit as a tool for poverty alleviation. Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at NYU and author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, will discuss the global rise of microfinance and the widely celebrated model pioneered by Muhammad Yunus.
Drawing on decades of research, Morduch will examine how households really use microcredit, showing that these loans often serve as flexible tools for managing everyday financial pressures rather than as straightforward investments in small businesses, ultimately highlighting the need for a broader understanding of poverty.
A light reception to follow.
About the Speaker
Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. His research focuses on poverty, inequality, and finance.
Morduch is the author with Rachel Schneider of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton 2017), and co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009); The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press 2010); and Economics (McGraw-Hill 2021, 3rd ed.), an introductory text. He is coeditor of Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion (MIT Press).
Morduch is a founder and Executive Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative. He has taught on the Economics faculty at Harvard, and has held visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, Hitotsubashi University and the University of Tokyo. Morduch received a BA from Brown and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels for his work on microfinance.