Markets for consumer financial services are growing rapidly in low and middle income countries and being transformed by digital technologies and platforms. With growth and change come concerns about protecting consumers from firm exploitation due to imperfect information and contracting as well...

Two for-profit Philippine social enterprises, aiming to demonstrate corporate social responsibility by increasing microlending to the poor, incorporated a widely-used poverty measurement tool into their loan applications and tested the tool using randomized training content. Treated loan...

Is financial knowledge change necessary for lasting savings behavior change? Or, akin to the canonical Friedman billiards player, can behavior persist “as if” such knowledge is held? We randomize 240 Ugandan young-adult clubs to financial education, savings account access, both, or neither....

Causal inference lies at the heart of social science, and the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics highlights the value of randomized variation for identifying causal effects and mechanisms. But causal inference cannot rely on randomized variation alone; it also requires good data. Yet the...

There is little evidence on how the large market for credit score improvement products affects consumers or credit market efficiency. A randomized encouragement design on a standard credit builder loan (CBL) identifies null average effects on whether consumers have a credit score and the score...