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，特别是在发展中国家，仍有许多未知之处。低储蓄是难以获得安全、负担得起的储蓄产品的结果，还是家庭还需要专门设计的机制来帮助他们承诺储蓄？我们正在与菲律宾的一家农村银行合作，提供以市场为导向的具有承诺功能的创新储蓄设备。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，目的是得出强有力的政策结论，说明扩大这些客户响应型产品对菲律宾贫困农村人口总体经济成果的潜在影响。我们将收集一整套结果变量，这样我们不仅可以衡量农村银行储蓄的变化，还可以衡量正规和非正规渠道家庭总储蓄的变化。此外，我们将收集消费和投资数据，这样我们就可以观察到额外的储蓄是如何被使用或没有被使用的，最后，我们将对谁决定接受承诺储蓄产品进行深入分析，这样我们就可以尝试解开储蓄行为的竞争理论。

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.