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Diskussionspapiere 1920 / 2020
This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a plan to reach this goal. The control group is given a plain calendar. We find no average effect on savings, ...
2020| Helke Seitz
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Diskussionspapiere 1914 / 2020
About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...
2020| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff
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Diskussionspapiere 1912 / 2020
We study the role of financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol (Andreoni and Sprenger 2012). While we find no evidence of dynamically inconsistent preferences in the aggregate, we document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher levels of financial ...
2020| Luis Oberrauch, Tim Kaiser
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DIW Weekly Report 21/22 / 2020
Mobile money is an innovation that allows financial transactions to be performed via a cell phone. Even in poor regions of Africa, almost everyone has a cell phone; therefore, mobile money could both contribute to the continent’s economic growth and ensure that no Africans are excluded from access to financial services. However, DIW Berlin data from Uganda show that mobile money is actually used less ...
2020| Katharina Lehmann-Uschner, Lukas Menkhoff
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Diskussionspapiere 1860 / 2020
This paper studies the effects of labor market outcomes on firms’ loan demand and on credit intermediation. In a first step, I investigate how wages in the production sector affect bank net worth and the process of financial intermediation in partial equilibrium. Second, the role of the identified channels are studied in general equilibrium using a new- Keynesian DSGE-model with financial frictions and ...
2020| Tobias König
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Diskussionspapiere 1891 / 2020
Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias in heat energy consumption. In Germany, the 12-month billing period varies across buildings with a significant ...
2020| Puja Singhal
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Externe referierte Aufsätze
While in January 2012, Denmark increased the long-standing tax on sugary soft drinks, the tax was cut byhalf in July 2013 and then completely repealed in January 2014. In this study, we examine whetherincreases and cuts of the soft drink tax lead to similar over- or under-shifting to prices and to similardemand responses. We use longitudinal scanner data of 1,282 Danish households to estimate within-product ...
In:
Economics and Human Biology
37 (2020), 100864, 10 S.
| Renke Schmacker, Sinne Smed
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Diskussionspapiere 1864 / 2020
We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge and downstream financial behaviors. Treatment effects are economically meaningful ...
2020| Tim Kaiser, Annamaria Lusardi, Lukas Menkhoff, Carly Urban
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Diskussionspapiere 1888 / 2020
In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing affects consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer welfare consequences ...
2020| Kevin Ducbao Tran
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DIW Roundup 137 / 2020
There are various reasons why humans may want to reduce their consumption of meat and other animal products. In the following, we lay out important stylized facts about individual meat consumption, and then discuss the challenges and puzzles surrounding effective behavior change toward more sustainable, plant-based diets.
2020| Jana Friedrichsen, Manja Gärtner