Experimental Evidence about Earning, Saving, and Borrowing Money in Rural Malawi.

Abstract

In the first chapter of this dissertation, I estimate the wage elasticity of working in the day labor market in rural Malawi using panel data from a unique field experiment. Though employment in daily wage markets is important to individuals and governments in developing countries, there is little evidence about labor supply in those markets. My estimates are from a field experiment in which 529 adults from ten different villages are offered a day's work once per week for 12 consecutive weeks, with wages ranging from MK 30 ($US 0.21) to MK 140 ($US 1.00) per day. I find that the elasticity of employment is between 0.15 and 0.17, with no significant differences between men and women.

The second chapter asks whether informal insurance networks or social norms about sharing income can explain the high marginal propensities to consume that are common in developing countries. I employ a field experiment to distinguish between the use of windfall money when receipt of the money is known to others in the community versus when it is private information. I find that immediate spending is 35 percent higher for individuals who receive money in a public setting compared to those who received money privately. This spending pattern is consistent with a seven percent tax on surplus income in a simple model where a fraction of money that is not spent immediately must be shared with others in the social network.

The third chapter, written jointly with Xavier Gine and Dean Yang, describes the results of a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining borrower responses to being fingerprinted when applying for loans. This intervention improved the lender’s ability to implement dynamic repayment incentives, allowing it to withhold future loans from past defaulters while rewarding good borrowers with better loan terms. As predicted by a simple model, fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates for borrowers with the highest ex ante default risk, but had no effect for the rest of borrowers. We provide unique evidence that this improvement in repayment rates is accompanied by behaviors consistent with less adverse selection and lower moral hazard.