The Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty (CFSP) is a private economic research consortium dedicated to studying the interaction of financial systems and poverty, using a variety of economic approaches in a range of developing countries.

The CFSP was established in 2009 by a grant to the University of Chicago from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with Robert M. Townsend

Robert M. Townsend

Robert M. Townsend is an American economist and professor, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining MIT, he was the Charles E...

 (MIT) as Principal Investigator, and economists Juliano Assuncao (PUC-Rio), Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian economist. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

 (MIT), Francisco Buera (UCLA), Douglas Diamond

Diamond-Dybvig model

The Diamond–Dybvig model is an influential model of bank runs and related financial crises. The model shows how banks' mix of illiquid assets and liquid liabilities may give rise to self-fulfilling panics among depositors.-Theory:The model, published in 1983 by Douglas W...

 (Booth School of Business

Booth School of Business

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is a graduate business school located in Chicago, Illinois, at the University of Chicago. Formerly known as the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Chicago Booth is the second oldest business school in the U.S., the first such school...

), Roberto Rigobon (MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts....

), Kenneth Singleton

Kenneth Singleton

for the American baseball player see Ken SingletonKenneth Jan "Ken" Singleton is an American economist. He is a leading figure in empirical financial economics, and a faculty member at Stanford University....

 (Stanford), Tavneet Suri (MIT), Christopher Udry (Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

), Christopher Woodruff (UCSD) as members.

The CFSP shares members with several other organizations that work in development economics

Development economics

Development Economics is a branch of economics which deals with economic aspects of the development process in low-income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example,...

, including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is an academic center located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics which is dedicated to evaluating the impact of anti-poverty programs through randomized controlled trials similar to those used in medical research...

, the Financial Access Initiative

Financial Access Initiative

Established in 2006, the Financial Access Initiative is an American consortium of researchers at New York University, Yale University, Harvard University and Innovations for Poverty Action focused on finding answers to how financial sectors can better meet the needs of poor households.The...

, and Innovations for Poverty Action. In contrast to these organizations, however, which tend to focus on rigorous randomized evaluations to generate policy recommendations, the CFSP attempts to connect traditional approaches in developmental economics to a wider range of approaches and models, including general equilibrium models applied to both macro and regional financial systems.