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Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya∗

The automobile company offers both stocks and bonds. With the bonds, the company agrees to pay you back your initial investment in ten years, plus pay you interest twice a year at the rate of 8% a year. If you buy the stock, you take on the risk of potentially los- ing a portion or all of your initial investment if the company does poorly or the stock market drops in value. But you also may see the stock increase in value beyond what you could earn from the bonds. If you buy the stock, you become an “owner” of the company. You. | Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya Pascaline Dupas Jonathan Robinson March 11 2012 Abstract Does limited access to formal savings services impede business growth in poor countries To shed light on this question we randomized access to non-interest-bearing bank accounts among two types of self-employed individuals in rural Kenya market vendors who are mostly women and men working as bicycle-taxi drivers. Despite large withdrawal fees a substantial share of market women used the accounts were able to save more and increased their productive investment and private expenditures. We see no impact for bicycle-taxi drivers. These results imply significant barriers to savings and investment for market women in our study context. Further work is needed to understand what those barriers are and to test whether the results generalize to other types of businesses or individuals. JEL Codes O12 G21 L26 Keywords Financial Services Investment Poverty Alleviation For helpful discussions and suggestions we are grateful to Orazio Attanasio Jean-Marie Baland Leo Feler Fred Finan Sarah Green Seema Jayachandran Dean Karlan Ethan Ligon Craig McIntosh David McKenzie John Strauss Dean Yang Chris Woodruff two anonymous referees and participants at numerous seminars and conferences. We thank Jack Adika and Anthony Oure for their dedication and care in supervising the data collection and Nathaniel Wamkoya for outstanding data entry. We thank Eva Kaplan Katherine Conn Sefira Fialkoff and Willa Friedman for excellent field research assistance and thank Innovations for Poverty Action for administrative support. We are grateful to Aleke Dondo of the K-Rep Development Agency for hosting this project in Kenya and to Gerald Abele for his help in the early stages of the project. Dupas gratefully acknowledges the support of a Rockefeller Center faculty research grant from Dartmouth College and Robinson gratefully acknowledges the support of an