Get Your Goat: Planning, Saving, and Ceremonial Spending
Get Your Goat: Planning, Saving, and Ceremonial Spending
7 July, 2020 •Similar Articles
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Providing “nudges” or simple reminders is increasingly seen as a way to help households overcome behavioral biases. We conducted a randomized evaluation in Niger of interventions designed to assist households in planning for spending on religious ceremonies: a lockbox, SMS reminders about savings goals and a combination of the two. These interventions had no impact on household expenditures for religious festivals or other ceremonies, such as weddings, naming ceremonies or funerals. Nevertheless, they shifted the financial mechanisms that households used to pay for some of these events towards savings. The SMS interventions allowed households to increase their overall savings amounts, whereas the lockbox interventions allowed households to better meet certain savings goals, increase health expenditures and reduce food insecurity. These effects differ substantially between men and women, suggesting that the cooperative bargaining model may not hold.