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Field
Experimental Design (Public)
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Before
• Control. The surveyor offers households a choice between a packet of colored labels, where each color corresponds to one of six expenditure categories, and sugar. Households can use these at any time to label their maize bags according to what they would like to spend on each category. Households are told that if they choose the labels, the surveyor will help them affix the labels to their maize bags.
• Treatment. Costly effort. The surveyor asks households to think through allocating their maize endowment among each major category for the upcoming year. Specifically, the surveyor undertakes a structured exercise that prompts respondents to remember the universe of possible expenses (e.g. school fees for each term, each type of farm input cost in each month, etc.) This forces respondents to remember each possible upcoming expense that will contribute to each category. Households are then given the choice to take up the same packet of labels as in Control, and can attach these to their maize bags to visually represent their plan (or ask the surveyor to do it for them).
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After
• Control. The surveyor offers households a choice between a packet of colored labels, where each color corresponds to one of six expenditure categories, and sugar. Households can use these at any time to label their maize bags according to what they would like to spend on each category. Households are told that if they choose the labels, the surveyor will help them affix the labels to their maize bags.
• Treatment. Costly effort. The surveyor asks households to think through allocating their maize endowment among each major category for the upcoming year. Specifically, the surveyor undertakes a structured exercise that prompts respondents to remember the universe of possible expenses (e.g. school fees for each term, each type of farm input cost in each month, etc.) This forces respondents to remember each possible upcoming expense that will contribute to each category. Households are then given the choice to take up the same packet of labels as in Control, and can attach these to their maize bags to visually represent their plan (or ask the surveyor to do it for them).
n follow up data collection with a different sample of households, we examine two types of budget boards: a 2-category board on which households can allocate maize between non-food and food expenses for the coming year, versus a budget board that is the same as in the main study (multiple categories of non-food expenses and month-by-month food expenses). We assign one group to allocate expenses for the coming year across the 2 categories in the 2-category board, after which they undertake this allocation across the full budget board. We assign the remaining households to allocate expenses for the coming year to the full budget board only. Our primary interest is in comparing the allocation of savings across categories and WTP (see primary outcome #2) between the two boards. As a supplementary suggestive exercise, we also ask households to list which specific expenses they had in mind when undertaking the exercise on each type of board in order to better understand what kinds of expenses are less versus more likely to be neglected.
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Field
Keyword(s)
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Before
Agriculture, Finance, Health, Labor, Welfare
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After
Agriculture, Finance, Health, Labor, Welfare
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