Thanks so much for the comment. I absolutely think that it’s very important to keep in mind how reporting bias might distort conclusions drawn from these databases. In reading your paper, I particularly liked that you disentangle financial indicators from social indicators. In my research for MFT, I find that this is something that is often implicitly understood as we conduct our research. A glance at the MIX data makes it obvious that social indicators are not as faithfully reported as financial indicators, and as such we rely primarily on the financial data.

Voluntary submission of data is obviously not the ideal, but it does provide an effective and useful approach and provides a good (and often the only) starting point from which to formulate ideas (rather than just working in a data vacuum). And as can be inferred from our name, MicroFinance Transparency believes that the best case scenario for an optimally functioning microfinance market would be for all MFIs to share key information so that in both practice and in policy MFIs could most efficiently adhere to a double bottom line strategy. Hopefully voluntary submission will eventually give us a completely populated dataset!

Lastly I would say that I particularly like the last paragraph of your paper: “Donors and policymakers have the power to support institutions in using these tools, and to help data collection organizations harmonize their data. Donors and researchers can also join to encourage non-reporting institutions to begin reporting. Our results suggest that doing so would enrich--and likely re-shape--understandings of the current microfinance landscape.” In our short time working on collecting data to engender transparency, it’s obvious that it’s key that all stakeholders be leveraged to incentivize information sharing. By gaining more and more data from more and more MFIs, we get closer to creating databases that truly provide us population-level information and thus can be used to make increasingly sound and accurate decisions.