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Household Decision making and Savings Impacts: Further Evidence from a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines

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Author Info
Nava Ashaf
Dean Karlan
Wesley Yin

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Abstract

Commitment devices for savings could benefit those with self-control as well as familial or spousal control issues. We examine the impact of a commitment savings product in the Philippines on household decision making power and savings attitudes. We find evidence to support both types of impacts. The product leads to more decision making power in the household for women, and likewise more purchases of female-oriented durable goods. We also find that the product leads women who appear time inconsistent in a baseline survey to self-report being a disciplined saver in the follow-up survey. For impact on savings balances, we find that the 81% increase in savings after one year did not crowd-out savings held outside of the participating bank, but that the longer-term impact (two-and-a-half years) on bank savings dissipated to only a 33% increase (which is no longer statistically significant). We discuss reasons why the effect dissipated and the implications for designing and implementing sustainable, equilibrium-shifting interventions.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by The Field Experiments Website in its series Natural Field Experiments with number 0009.

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Date of creation: 2006
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Handle: RePEc:feb:natura:0009

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Related research
Keywords: savings; microfinance; female empowerment; household decision making; commitment;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
D91 - Microeconomics - - Intertemporal Choice and Growth - - - Intertemporal Consumer Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
O12 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
O16 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Financial Markets; Saving and Capital Investment

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Beck, Thorsten & de la Torre, Augusto, 2006. "The basic analytics of access to financial services," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4026, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
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