CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Hanna Fromell

This week's Brown Bag will be given by Hanna Fromell.

Title: Sharing Norms and Saving Behaviour

We run a field experiment in Kenya and provide empirical evidence of the existence of sharing norms in rural poor communities and their impact on individual savings. Using the Krupka-Weber (2013) norm-elicitation method we show that these communities live by social norms that prescribe extensive sharing of income at the expense of own savings. For women, these norms are weaker if information about income is private rather than publicly known by the community. Using information on subjects’ bank account usage we show that these norms, and their interaction with public information, systematically affect actual saving behaviour.