Commitments to Save: A Field Experiment in Rural Malawi

In October of 2011, economists Lasse Brune, Dean Yang, Xavier Giné and Jessica Goldberg published a new study on commitment savings. This study was conducted with help from the formal bank Opportunity International Bank of Malawi. This study supports some of the earlier findings from a study written by professors Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson and provides interesting additional information. This study focused on male tobacco farmers, who received loans from the Opportunity International Bank of Malawi as part of a 10-15 member group. As David Roodman pointed out in his blog post, “this study was designed to shed light on why commitment savings accounts help people, by measuring impacts on intermediate variables.”