Key Takeaways on Innovations in Commitment Savings for the Poor from Jessica Goldberg (University of Maryland)

Jessica Goldberg of the University of Maryland/Center for Global Development shares her key takeaways from the After Hours Seminar #61, "Matching Products with Preferences: Innovations in Commitment Savings for the Poor." In this video, Goldberg discusses the findings of a recent study she worked on that focused on the savings behavior male tobacco farmers who received different account products from the Opportunity International Bank of Malawi. 

Bio: Jessica Goldberg

Dr. Jessica Goldberg is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Global Development. Her research focuses on the ways that people in developing countries earn, spend, and save money. She is particularly interested in how financial market imperfections, behavioral factors, or other obstacles to borrowing and saving affect decisions about working and consuming. She is studying how people in rural communities adjust their labor supply to changes in wages and non-wage income; collaborating with researchers at the World Bank and officials at the Malawi Social Action Fund to study the program’s roles in consumption smoothing and investment in agricultural inputs; and developing new projects to understand how social pressure to share income affects labor supply and responsiveness to wage incentives. Goldberg received her Ph.D in Economics and Public Policy from the University of Michigan in 2011, and also holds an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a BA in economics and political science from Stanford University.