SGER: Commitment Devices and Savings Behavior: A Pilot Experiment in the Philippines

储蓄使家庭能够平稳消费并进行投资。储蓄还有助于稳定银行市场，推动经济增长。然而，关于储蓄的决定因素仍有许多未知之处，尤其是在发展中国家。低储蓄率是因为人们很难获得安全、负担得起的储蓄产品，还是家庭也需要专门为帮助他们进行储蓄而设计的机制？我们正在与菲律宾的一家农村银行合作，提供具有承诺功能的市场驱动的创新储蓄工具。该项目采用严格的实验研究设计，随机分配到治疗组和对照组，以得出强有力的政策结论，以确定这些响应客户的产品的扩展对贫困的菲律宾农村人的整体经济结果的潜在影响。我们将收集一整套结果变量，以便我们不仅可以衡量农村银行储蓄的变化，还可以衡量正式和非正式工具中家庭储蓄总额的变化。此外，我们将收集消费和投资数据，以便我们可以观察额外的储蓄是如何使用的，最后我们将对谁决定使用承诺储蓄产品进行深入分析，以便我们能够试图理清储蓄行为的相互矛盾的理论。

Savings allows households to smooth consumption and make investments. Savings also helps stabilize banking markets and fuel economic growth. Yet much remains unknown about the determinants of savings, particularly in developing countries. Are low savings a consequence of low access to safe, affordable savings product, or do households also need mechanisms designed specifically to help them commit to save?We are working with a rural bank in the Philippines to offer market-driven innovative savings devices with commitment features. The project employs a rigorous experimental research design, with random assignment to treatment and control groups, in order to draw robust policy conclusions about the potential implications for expansion of these client-responsive products on overall economic outcomes for poor, rural Filipinos. We will collect a full set of outcome variables so that we can measure not only changes in savings at the rural bank, but changes in aggregate household savings in both formal andinformal vehicles. Furthermore, we will collect consumption and investment data so that we can observe how additional savings were or were not used, and lastly we will conduct in depth analysis of who decides to take-up the commitment savings products so that we can try to disentangle competing theories of savings behavior.