EVALUATING THE IMPACTS OF MICROSAVING: THE CASE OF SEWA BANK IN INDIA

This paper estimates the impact of participating in the savings program of SEWA Bank in India on household income and consumption. Contrary to microcredit, microsaving has not received much attention in the empirical literature yet which can be explained by a lack of reliable household data. The paper uses panel data to account for individual unobserved effects that can lead to substantial biases when not being controlled for. I find that when controlling for self-selection, no significant impacts of the program can be observed and that naive estimates, which do not account for selection biases, severely overstate program impacts.