This paper starts from a puzzle. On the one hand, the literature documents that a large proportion of poor people are ready to forgo interest on rigid – or commitment – savings accounts to discipline their future selves. On the other, our stylized facts from Bangladesh show that microfinance...

I examine the use of flexible savings-and-loan accounts offered by SafeSave, a microfinance institution serving poor slum dwellers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I find that 59 per cent of the clients co-hold, meaning that they borrow at high interest rates and simultaneously hold low-yield liquid...

Access to commitment savings products is known to increase poor households’ savings. In this paper we analyze the process through which households change their savings behavior, by exploiting a unique dataset released by SafeSave, a Bangladeshi microfinance institution that launched the Long...

Recent evidence shows that the poor desperately need access to savings products. But despite this general consensus, microfinance institutions (MFIs) offering savings products are still under-studied. Using random-effect probit estimation on a dataset of 722 MFIs active over the 2005-2010...