Suchergebnisse

"The controversy over whether and how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use. We test this hypothesis in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. Our methodology separates the screening effect of prices (charging more changes the mix of buyers) from the psychological effect of prices (charging more stimulates greater use for a given buyer). We find that higher prices screen out those who use the product less. The amount paid does not have a psychological effect on use, but there is some evidence that the act of paying increases use. We use our data to estimate an economic model of product use, simulate counterfactuals, and develop tentative implications for pricing policy"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

I elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the Philippines. When choices are private, men put money into their personal accounts. When choices are observable, men commit money to consumption for their own benefit. When required to communicate, men put money into their wives' account. These strong treatment effects on men, but not women, appear related more to control than to gender: men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treatment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response. Changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender-specific outcomes. (JEL D13, D14, J12, J16, O15)

To understand altruistic behavior, we must understand the process through which altruism develops and is shaped by the agents' own choices and exogenous factors. We introduce the concept of altruistic capital, which grows with effort devoted to altruistic acts and facilitates future altruism. We illustrate its potential use in the context of banking and conclude by showing that returns to altruistic effort shape the agent's choices and are shaped by external events such as the financial crisis.

We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 percent less likely to seek family planning services, 25 percent less likely to use concealable contraception, and 27 percent more likely to give birth. However, women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well-being, suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable. (JEL C78, D12, D82, I31, J13, J16, O15)

Informal lending and savings institutions exist around the world, and often include regular door-to-door deposit collection of cash. Some banks have adopted similar services in order to expand access to banking services in areas that lack physical branches. Using a randomized control trial, we investigate determinants of participation in a deposit collection service and evaluate the impact of offering the service for micro-savers of a rural bank in the Philippines. Of 137 individuals offered the service in the treatment group, 38 agreed to sign-up, and 20 regularly used the service. Take-up is predicted by distance to the bank (a measure of transaction costs of depositing without the service) as well as being married (a suggestion that household bargaining issues are important). Those offered the service saved 188 pesos more (which equates to about a 25% increase in savings stock) and were slightly less likely to borrow from the bank.

The controversy over how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect. We develop a methodology for separating these two effects. We implement the methodology in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. We find evidence of economically important screening effects. By contrast, we find no consistent evidence of sunk-cost effects. (JEL C93, D12, I11, M31, O12)