Leora F. Klapper is an American economist who currently works as a lead economist at the World Bank in the Finance and Private Sector research team as part of the Development Research group. Klapper has held government jobs in Washington, DC and Jerusalem, Israel in the Bank of Israel, as well as having held private sector jobs for Peter L. Bernstein and the Salomon Brothers firm in New York. She is also the founder of The Global Findex Database and Entrepreneurship Database.
Education Klapper received her B.S. in Economics and Math (with Honors) at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1990. Klapper then earned her Ph.D. in Financial Economics from the Stern School of Business at New York University in 1998 where she specialized in Corporate Finance, Financial institutions, and wrote her final dissertation "Essays on Collateralization". While at the Stern School of Business, Klapper earned the Dean's "Outstanding Teaching Award" for a graduate instructor (1997), the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies Fellowship (1996–1998), and the University Doctoral Fellowship at New York University (1993–1996).
Career Klapper currently works as a Lead Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Research Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, having joined as a Young Economist in 1998, focusing on entrepreneurship, access to finance, corporate governance, bankruptcy, and risk management. She has also been a co-editor for the World Bank Economic Review since 2016. Klapper has previously held public sector jobs from 1988 to 1992 working for the Office of Management and Budget and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC. She has also worked public sector jobs abroad, working at the Bank of Israel from 1992 to 1993. Klapper has also held many private sector jobs such as working for Peter L. Bernstein in New York, NY, as a researcher for the publication “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk” from 1995 to 1996 and having worked for the Salomon Brothers doing Economic and Market analysis from 1995 to 1998. She has also been a member of the BBVA Financial Literacy Board from 2016 to present and a Data Fellow for the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.
Klapper is also an Implementing Partner of the G-20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (2010–present). She is also currently working as her Majesty Queen Maxima of the Netherlands UN Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance and for Development (UNSGSA) as a Reference Group Member (2016–present). She has also held positions as a working group member for the World Economic Forum Financial Inclusion Metrics and the OECD, as well as a board member for insight2impact.
Klapper has been invited to present at the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange, several international banks, G20 Global Partnership Summits, The Guardian, the UN, the Brookings Foundation, as well as many business schools worldwide. Her topics have ranged from financial inclusion lifting poverty, mobile money implementation, the link between financial inclusion and economic growth, gender and income discrepancies, to the digital revolution and female labour force participation.
Research and academic work Klapper's primary research fields include: Behavioral economics, consumer finance, digital payments, entrepreneurial finance, financial inclusion, risk management, and supply chain finance. Much of Klapper's work explores the relationship between an economy's involvement in the financial system and how this effects income, growth, and wellbeing. She explores an economy's financial involvement in many different ways ranging from what being an active member in the formal financial system signals to an employer, to how financial inclusion disproportionately grows and affects people across gender, geography, and wealth. Her research has been cited in 18,205 published and working papers, as well as being cited in press such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Forbes.
Klapper's most prolific works include The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution and Entrepreneurship Snapshots 2010: Measuring the Impact of the Financial Crisis on New Business, both of which were published with the World Bank. Klapper has also contributed chapters to many different books on topics ranging from banking and financial inclusion in developing economies to entrepreneurship and its effect on firm formation. Her current working papers include examining how civil conflict affects firm performance, the effectiveness of government delivery of goods and services, and benefits from illiquid savings products.
Select scholarship
"The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution"
Under the supervision of Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Klapper oversaw a team of Dorothe Singer, Saniya Ansar, and Jake Hess to create a database and report that summarizes global financial inclusion as a result of the financial technology revolution. The report documents account ownership by economy, areas lacking banking infrastructure, how different economies make payments, how accounts are used, the amount of saving, credit, and financial resilience, and the opportunities that are arising for promoting financial inclusion due to the rise of the digital era. The Global Findex Database has had over 40,000 press citations since being founded by Klapper in 2011. The report was compiled using surveys of more than 150,000 adults over the age of 15 in over 140 economies, giving detailed results of how adults in these economies access accounts, make payments, borrow, and manage risk. The authors note that this data is important since it has been found that access to financial technology like mobile money services can increase income earning potential, and that these benefits are even more pronounced for women. This access to mobile money services in Kenya enabled women to increase their savings and investments by more than one-fifth and reduce extreme poverty in women-led households by 22%.
The report found that the global share of adults that own a bank account is 69%, which is up from 62% in 2014 and 58% in 2011. This equates into 515 million adults worldwide who have gained access to financial tools to help grow the economy. Klapper and the report note that this gain was most prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa where 21% of adults now have a mobile money account, almost double what the 2014 report showed. It was also found that the financial technology improvements have led to 52% of adults having sent digital payments, 10 percentage points higher than the 2014 value, with significant gains in China where 57% now use financial technology to pay bills, double the 2014 value. Importantly, the report notes that women lag significantly behind men globally in their financial inclusion gains; 65% of women have opened accounts, compared to 72% of men. Klapper also points out that there is a disparity in financial inclusion across income levels. Financial participation was 13 percentage points higher in the wealthiest 60% of household incomes, evident in the 200 million rural people in China outside of the formal financial system.
"Entrepreneurship Snapshots 2010: Measuring the Impact of the Financial Crisis on New Business" Leora Klapper along with Inessa Love led a team of Elena Cirmizi, Caroline Giraud, and Douglas Randall to create a report documenting new business sector growth from 2004–2009 to give insight into factors that spur private sector growth across different economies. Like the Global Findex Database, this database was founded by Leora Klapper in 2004. The report measures entrepreneurial activity in 112 developing and high income economies to answer the following 4 questions: 1. How does firm creation vary around the world with the level of economic and financial development? 2. What is the relationship between entrepreneurship and business development? 3. How did the financial crisis affect entrepreneurial activity in the formal sector? and 4. What factors determined how severely the crisis affected new firm creation? This is based on Klapper, Laeven, & Rajan's 2004 study which shows that a high entry rate of new businesses equates to higher competition in the economy as well as higher economic growth.
The paper's main data collected is the density of new business entry, measured by the number of newly registered limited liability firms per 1,000 people of working age (15–64), collected directly from the registrar. The paper notes that this is an effective measure but is only able to capture the formal financial sector even though much of the production in some economies lies in the informal financial sector. The paper finds a discrepancy across income levels of countries, namely that high-income countries had more than 4 new business registered per 1000 people, while low-medium and low income countries had less than 1 per 1000 people. The paper discusses that this largely could be due to the factors that come with being a high income country. Specifically, the paper notes that there is more dynamic business creation when there is also stable legal and regulatory regimes, efficient business registration systems, flexible employment regulations, and low corporate tax rates. The paper also determines that due to a sharp increase in the scarcity of credit and an uncertain future economic outlook following the 2008 financial crisis there was a sharp drop in registration rates in countries affected by such - namely countries with strong formal financial sectors.
"Financial Inclusion and Inclusive Growth: A Review of Recent Empirical Evidence"
Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Leora Klapper, and Dorothe singer review the evidence presented in their Global Findex Database (2014; 2017) to explore some of the conclusions made and resulting challenges to reaching greater financial inclusion and future direction for the field. The authors propose that financial inclusion can reduce poverty by helping people invest in their future towards education and new businesses, smooth their consumption by having more efficient and safer transactions, as well as educating and helping people manage their financial risks involving loss of employment or the death of a breadwinner, hopefully making it so fewer people fall into poverty initially as well. The paper documents the transition in economic theory worldwide over the past decade from a focus on microcredit loans in developing countries to a focus on account ownership, savings, payment methods, and insurance in these countries.