Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) are subsidized savings accounts. Unlike other subsidized savings accounts such as Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) or 401(k) plans, IDAs are targeted to the poor, provide subsidies through matches rather than through tax breaks, and require...

How do people respond to matched-savings incentives? Studies of 401(k) plans find that matching increases participation but that higher match rates do not increase--and may decrease--the level of savings. This paper analyzes saving by low-income people in Individual Development Accounts (IDAs),...

Development depends on saving. But what exactly is saving, and how is it measured? This paper defines saving and describes several measures of financial savings. The measures account for the passage of time and for the three stages of saving: putting in (depositing), keeping in (maintaining a...

A central prediction of the quasi-hyperbolic model of time preference is that consumers will be impatient over short-run tradeoffs. I present the first nonlaboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients. Caloric intake declines by 10 to 15...

Economic liberalization has induced a new dynamics on wage setting and employment on Mexican labor market. These changes have been caused by two related events: productive restructuring and increasing labor market flexibility. To the extent that productive restructuring has implied significant...

Most risk-sharing tests on developing country data are conducted at the level of the village; generally, the full risk-sharing hypothesis is rejected. This paper uses detailed data on all insurance networks within a village in Tanzania; networks are not clustered but largely overlapping. We test...

When analysing food consumption data a number of problems arise when one departs from the comparative statics of conventional demand theory. Two of these properties, non-linearity and non-stationarity present a major challenge for econometric modelling. A new method for time series analysis,...

Since the early 1990s, the Zambian government has undertaken major economic reforms. A sharp stabilisation early in the decade was followed by reforms in agricultural marketing, a large privatisation programme, sweeping trade policy reforms and reforms to the public sector. This paper uses...

In this study we are concerned with the impact of vocational training on the individual's unemployment duration in West Germany. The data basis used is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period from 1984 to 1994. To resolve the intriguing sample selection problem, i.e. to find an...