TY  - JOUR
AU  - Dupas, Pascaline
AU  - Keats, Anthony
AU  - Robinson, Jonathan
TI  - The Effect of Savings Accounts on Interpersonal Financial Relationships: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural Kenya
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21339
PY  - 2015
Y2  - July 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21339
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21339
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21339.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pascaline Dupas
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
E-Mail: pdupas@stanford.edu

Anthony Keats
Department of Economics
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
E-Mail: akeats@wesleyan.edu

Jonathan Robinson
Department of Economics
University of California, Santa Cruz
457 Engineering 2
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Tel: 831/459-5618
Fax: 831/459-5077
E-Mail: jmrtwo@ucsc.edu
AB  - The welfare impact of expanding access to bank accounts depends on whether accounts crowd out pre-existing financial relationships, or whether private gains from accounts are shared within social networks. To study the effect of accounts on financial linkages, we provided free bank accounts to a random subset of 885 households. Within households, we randomized which spouse was offered an account and find no evidence of negative spillovers to spouses. Across households, we document positive spillovers: treatment households become less reliant on grown children and siblings living outside their village, and become more supportive of neighbors and friends within their village.
ER  -