Testing strategies to increase saving in individual development account programs

Cäzilia Loibl, Lauren Jones and Emily Haisley

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2018, vol. 66, issue C, 45-63

Abstract: A series of randomized field experiments tests whether saving rates in a federally funded, matched, savings program for low-income families – the Individual Development Account program – can be improved through insights from behavioral economics. We test the impact of: (a) holding savers accountable for making savings deposits, (b) increasing the frequency with which deposits are made, and (c) introducing a lottery-based incentive structure. We find small, positive effects of the frequency and lottery treatments on cumulative savings. We investigate reasons for the modest effects of the treatments using interviews with study participants.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487017304798
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:66:y:2018:i:c:p:45-63

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2018.04.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().