The Milken Institute’s Center for Emerging Domestic Markets has been a leader in researching and writing about the issue of expanding investment in traditionally undervalued and undercapitalized entrepreneurs, enterprises and communities, including women and ethnic business owners, urban...

Chakrabarti discusses how the Institute for a Competitive Inner City has a long history of shining light on investment opportunities in the inner city. Through their Inner City 100 competition, they have collected an impressive database of EDM companies. But their greatest opportunity to bring...

Recent advances in finance and technology are providing new opportunities for individual investors to support and invest in microenterprises, and in some cases, bypassing intermediaries altogether. While these efforts at disintermediation are still new, they present a new way for poor...

In a speech to the Greenlining Institute, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke speaks to the need for developing and analyzing social and economic data at the local level to do the following: uncover new investment opportunities; provide transparency and promote good governance and...

Securities markets depend on data. In the absence of data, it is not possible to underwrite risk,> and judgments about risk are crucial to securities pricing. This essay discusses the sort of data> that would be necessary to make underwriting decisions for community development funding.

The data on emerging domestic markets are fragmented, non-standardized, and not widely accessible. One way to remedy this information gap would be to create a “data consortium” that leverages existing resources and uses them to build an integrated database. Increasing the amount and quality...