Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya's Mobile Money Revolution

By W. Jack, Tavneet Suri. 2014

1,225 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption. In our panel sample, adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent. We find that, while shocks reduce consumption by 7 percent for nonusers, the consumption of user households is unaffected. The mechanisms underlying these consumption effects are increases in remittances received and the diversity of senders. We report robustness checks supporting these results and use the four-fold expansion of the mobile money agent network as a source of exogenous variation in access to the innovation.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a4c439c1225ae4f5a696dbb1fcbe166c184edff

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Citations in the corpus

Airtime transfers and mobile communications: Evidence in the aftermath of natural disasters (2016, methodology): “Recent work in this area describes how mobile phones can, under certain conditions, reduce information asymmetries and search costs in agricultural markets (Jensen, 2007; Aker, 2008; Fafchamps and Minten, 2012; Aker and Fafchamps, 2014), lower transaction costs (Jack and Suri, 2014), and potentially”
Social Networks, Reputation, and Commitment: Evidence From a Savings Monitors Experiment (2019, background): “…learning how to use financial products; (b) reminders; (c) posting a bond; or (d) reference-dependent preferences (“keeping up with the Joneses”) (see Jack and Suri (2014), Cai et al. (2013), Bryan et al. (2012), Kast et al. (2012), Beaman et al. (2014), Beshears et al. (2015), Munshi (2014),…”
Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2016, neutral): “Examples from other sectors include the use of mobile telephones to circumvent the lack of formal banking systems (Jack and Suri, 2014), the use of electronic voting machines for better enfranchisement of illiterate citizens (Fujiwara, 2015) and the use of biometric authentication to circumvent lite”
ACHIEVING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (2016, background): “Jack and Suri (2014) also showed that mobile payments help people receive assistance from far-flung relatives when faced with a shock.”
Internal Labor Migration as a Shock Coping Strategy: Evidence from a Typhoon (2016, background): “2For evidence on international migration, see, for example, Hanson (2009), Clemens (n.d.), for internal migration de Brauw and Harigaya (2007), De Weerdt and Hirvonen (2013), Bryan et al. (2014) and Jack and Suri (2014).”
Mobile financial services and financial inclusion: Is it a boon for savings mobilization? (2017, background): “…widespread adoption of mobile phones that has advanced from a simple communication gadget to a savings tool by both the wealthy and poor households (Jack and Suri, 2014, 2011; Honohan and King, 2012; Shem et al., 2012; Mbithi and Weil, 2011; Wilson et al., 2010; Collins et al., 2009; Comninos et…”
Banking on Trust: How Debit Cards Enable the Poor to Save More (2017, background): “…facilitated by these technologies to make purchases (Zinman, 2009), access savings and remittances (Suri, Jack, and Stoker, 2012; Schaner, forthcoming), and transfer money (Jack, Ray, and Suri, 2013; Jack and Suri, 2014), but not their capacity to monitor and build trust in nancial institutions.”