IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04284854.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Neighbourhood social capital, account usage and savings behaviour in low‐income countries: Field experimental evidence from Senegal

Author

Listed:
  • Patrick Behr
  • Jorge Jacob

    (LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Financial inclusion is an important driver of economic growth, but gender gaps persist in financial activity, especially in low‐income countries. This study analyses the impact of text messages that make salient neighbours' savings behaviour on account usage and savings behaviour of low‐income men and women in Senegal. We performed a randomized field experiment in which 2056 clients of a local financial institution were assigned to one of three experimental conditions. We found gender differences in how these text messages impact savings and account usage. Account usage, account activity and average savings balances of female clients who received weekly savings reminders making their neighbours' savings behaviour salient increased compared to those who received generic savings reminders and those who received no savings reminders. The treatment had no impact on male clients. These results suggest that content‐specific text message reminders can create benefits for both the supply and demand side of financial services for women in low‐income countries, thereby increasing financial inclusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick Behr & Jorge Jacob, 2023. "Neighbourhood social capital, account usage and savings behaviour in low‐income countries: Field experimental evidence from Senegal," Post-Print hal-04284854, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04284854
    DOI: 10.1002/jid.3806
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04284854. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.