Facilitating Savings for Agriculture: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi
Facilitating Savings for Agriculture: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi
7 July, 2020 •Similar Articles
Saving More to Borrow Less: Experimental Evidence from Access to Formal Savings Accounts in Chile
Poverty is often characterized not only by low and unstable income, but also by heavy debt burdens. We find that reducing barriers to saving throug...
An Incentive-Compatible Experiment on Probabilistic Insurance and Implications for an Insurer’s Solvency Level
This article is the first to conduct an incentive‐compatible experiment using real monetary payoffs to test the hypothesis of probabilistic insur...
Savings Monitors
We conduct a field experiment in India to explore two interventions to help individuals to increase their savings balances. First, we design a fina...
We implemented a randomized intervention among Malawian farmers aimed at facilitating formal savings for agricultural inputs. Treated farmers were offered the opportunity to have their cash crop harvest proceeds deposited directly into new bank accounts in their own names, while farmers in the control group were paid harvest proceeds in cash (the status quo). The treatment led to higher savings in the months immediately prior to the next agricultural planting season, and raised agricultural input usage in that season. We also find positive treatment effects on subsequent crop sale proceeds and household expenditures. Because the treatment effect on savings was only a small fraction of the treatment effect on the value of agricultural inputs, mechanisms other than alleviation of savings constraints per se are needed to explain the treatment’s impact on input utilization. We discuss other possible mechanisms through which treatment effects may have operated.