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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
How Cutting The Cost Of Using A Bank Affects Household’S Behavior Of Remittance Transfers: Evidence From A Field Experiment In Rural Malawi, Chuyuan Lu
CMC Senior Theses
Using a randomized experiment in rural Malawi, this paper finds that providing information on mobile bank buses’ services leads to a higher probability of adopting savings accounts in the treatment group. Households in the treated villages are 3.06 percentage points more likely to adopt savings accounts than households in the control group. Second, the information treatment leads to an increase of in the probability of households receiving remittances in the treated villages, as well as an increase in the amount of remittances received. In particular, the effect is strongest for households that lived at least three kilometers away from the …
Escaping The Poverty Trap: Formal Savings And Asset Accumulation In Rural Malawi, Audrey Breitwieser
Escaping The Poverty Trap: Formal Savings And Asset Accumulation In Rural Malawi, Audrey Breitwieser
CMC Senior Theses
Formal savings accounts can be an effective device for households to accumulate assets over time and thus have more funds available to better afford an expensive one-time payment, in the form of either addressing an economic shock or paying for an important life event. I explore this relationship using a field experiment in rural Malawi conducted from 2008-2010, and find that adoption of a formal savings account has no effect on the frequency of economic shocks that a household experiences, nor does it affect how households respond to shocks. However, I find that account adoption does significantly increase the frequency …