Abstract
In this project, we study the impact of the introduction of a new financial product, mobile banking (savings), on attitudes towards sharing money with others. Our study is motivated by previous findings that formal financial products allow people to "hide" savings from social pressure (Carranza et al., 2022 and Riley, 2022 among others) as well as the literature showing that exposure to financial products and financial markets can affect attitudes towards sharing money with a spouse (Riley, 2022), political views (Kaustia et al. 2016, Jha, 2015), attitudes towards risk (Lu et al. 2022), attitudes towards meritocracy and personal responsibility (Margalit and Shayo, 2021) as well as attitudes towards peace and interethnic conflict (Jha and Shayo, 2019). Our project sits at the interaction of these two literatures. Our goal is to study whether being introduced to mobile banking affects attitudes towards sharing and whether this is driven by a wealth/savings effect.
To do this, we conduct an RCT in which people are given cash grants either in the form of cash, a transfer to a mobile bank account or a transfer to a mobile bank account with an incentive to save. We track people's attitudes towards sharing with others using repeated surveys over a 6-8 month horizon in which we measure attitudes (along with a range of other outcomes - we are using the same infrastructure as in another RCT).