Do Incentives Matter for the Diffusion of Financial Knowledge? Experimental Evidence from Uganda

John Sseruyange and Erwin Bulte

Journal of African Economies, 2018, vol. 27, issue 5, 612-631

Abstract: Many development interventions involve training of beneficiaries, based on the assumption that knowledge and skills will spread ‘automatically’ among a wider target population. However, diffusion of knowledge or innovations can be slow and incomplete. We use a randomised field experiment in Uganda to assess the impact of providing incentives for knowledge diffusion, and pay trained individuals a fee if they share knowledge obtained during a financial literacy training. Our main results are that incentives increase knowledge sharing, and that it may be cost-effective to provide such incentives. We also document an absence of assortative matching in the social learning process.

Keywords: knowledge sharing; spread of innovations; incentives for diffusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejy006 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jafrec:v:27:y:2018:i:5:p:612-631.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().