This paper uses a large scale field experiment in India to study attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive constraints that stymie the link between financial education and financial outcomes. The study complements financial education with (i) participant classroom motivation with pay for...

This paper uses a field experiment in India with multiple financial education treatments to investigate the causal mechanisms between financial education and financial behavior. Focusing on the mediating role of financial literacy, the paper proposes a broader definition of financial knowledge...

This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool against gambling and lottery behavior in South Africa. The study implemented a simple, interactive dice game that simulates worsening winning odds of rolling sixes as more dice are added to the game. The analysis exploits two levels of...

The share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015 but has continued to increase in many fragile and conflict-affected areas where half of the extreme poor are expected to reside by 2030. These areas are also where the least evidence exists on how to...

There is growing interest in using messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to investment in public goods. The authors worked with a leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on the basis of best practices,...

There is growing interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social or environmental returns. Examination of every equity investment made by one of the largest and longest-operating impact investors across 130 emerging market and developing economies...

Weather is a key source of income risk for many firms and households, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial approach to study how an innovative risk management instrument for hedging rainfall risk affects production decisions among a sample of...

Business survey outcomes for micro and small firms are notoriously noisy, with multiple sources of measurement and recall error. This paper introduces a new survey methodology that combines automatic consistency checks of electronic data collection with triangulation and dynamic adjustment to...

Can financial education delivery be successfully decentralized? This paper studies a large-scale field experiment with 200 Savings and Credit Cooperative Associations (SACCOs) in Rwanda, and tests competing models of local financial education delivery. One-third of SACCOs, randomly selected,...

Interest rate caps can have far-reaching consequences on the composition and maturity of commercial bank loans and deposits. This paper carefully documents these impacts on the formal financial sector in Kenya after the recent interest rate caps of 2016. Using bank-level panel data from before...