If you’re a teacher in the United States with a student loan, you can get $5,000 to $17,500 of your student loans forgiven by the federal government after five consecutive years of teaching in low-income schools. To do this, you’d have to first match the eligibility requirements to your position and your loans: If you took maternity leave does that year count? Does your loan count if you took a deferment while you got your Masters? This is detailed in an 8-page, 4,370 word application, linked towards the bottom of an FAQ page on the federal loan. Then you would have to figure out if your...
Media Coverage
November 22, 2019
MIT Technology Review writes in the wake of Goldman Sach's AppleCard scandal, in which the company's algorithm for lending was criticized for being significantly biased against women, about the potential benefits of gender-differentiated lending practices. The article points to research in the Dominican Republic evaluating a program with women-specific credit scoring found that credit scores improved for 93% of women had higher credit scores using the separate models for men and women than when they were grouped together.
Media Coverage
July 25, 2019
The Dhaka Tribune recaps a roundtable in which IPA Bangladesh Country Director, Dr. Mohammad Ashraful Haque, presented baseline findings of a survey on adolescent well-being, assessing mental, physical, and sexual/reproductive health as well as educational and economic development. The survey also noted the role of violence in the everyday lives of Dhaka adolescents, finding: 68% of married adolescents experience intimate partner violence, 82% of adolescents report experiencing corporal punishment at school, and 62% of female caregivers use physical punishment to discipline underage family...
Media Coverage
May 01, 2019
IPA Founder Dean Karlan spoke with one of Peru's largest newspapers, El Comercio, about how to increase contributions to retirement savings in Peru. They discussed how nudges can play an important role in creating saving habits but also noted that reminders for automated payroll individual can be counterproductive and that they might even be best off forgetting they have an account.
Media Coverage
March 25, 2019
Paraguay's ABC Color reports on a study in progress with the country's Ministry of Finance, testing whether a pension program for senior citizens improves the economic wellbeing and quality of life of its participants.
Brian Jacob, Damon Jones, Benjamin Keys
February 25, 2019
Media Coverage
February 22, 2019
The Dhaka Tribune recaps the 2019 Financial Inclusion Summit held in Dhaka, where IPA's Financial Inclusion Program Director, Rebecca Rouse, delivered a keynote speech. Rouse discussed how digital cash transfers can be more time and cost effective while ensuring greater accessibility and transparency. She cites IPA evidence on mobile money in Kenya and digital payments in Mexico.
Media Coverage
February 11, 2019
L'Economiste du Faso features evidence from an IPA study on marketing rainfall insurance to the urban relatives of rural farmers to increase uptake for the latter's benefit.
Media Coverage
January 28, 2019
The Star reports on an IPA study that tested the impact of providing rural households in Kenya with bank accounts for the first time. Although the overall use of these accounts was low, they helped some households to be more financially stable and independent.
Media Coverage
January 28, 2019
The Chicago Booth Review features IPA research by our founder Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Benjamin N. Roth on loan forgiveness while highlighting why so many people struggle to escape debt. To test the idea of “debt traps” the researchers paid off the high-interest debt of market vendors in the Philippines and India and found that most of the participants were back in debt within six weeks.
Media Coverage
January 04, 2019
IPA's Financial Inclusion Program Director, Rebecca Rouse, explains why many lower-income Americans live unbanked, without a checking or savings account. They are also more likely to rely on making payments in cash than middle-income and wealthier Americans who increasingly prefer to go cashless.
Media Coverage
January 04, 2019
Multinational banking group Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentari (BBVA) features an IPA report demonstrating how modifications in financial product design and services can "nudge" consumers towards improved financial health.
Media Coverage
July 18, 2018
Peru’s Gestión reports on a study in development between that country’s pension fund administrator and IPA to test the impact of matching contributions on enrollment and contributions to pensions among workers in Lima.
Media Coverage
July 18, 2018
Researchers Joshua Blumenstock, Michael Callen, and Tarek Ghani report on their work with IPA testing the effect of new mobile money platforms on long-term savings in Afghanistan. They describe how the nudge of defaulting employees into a savings program, and employer savings matches, increased savings significantly.
James Habyarimana, William Jack
July 02, 2018
Co-written with Alejandra Martinez
In this post, we feature an interview with James Habyarimana, Associate Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, and William Jack, Vice Provost of Research and Director of gui2de, both at Georgetown University. They conducted a field experiment in Kenya to test whether access to a mobile bank account or a restricted, goal-based account (i.e commitment savings account – which encouraged users to hold onto the money until school expenses were due) could help parents save for their children’s education expenses. Here, they both share...
Media Coverage
June 29, 2018
Peru's El Comercio reports on IPA's work studying the effects of matching contributions on employees saving for retirement. Researchers from the University of Maryland and Universidad del Pacifico are testing whether matching contributions can encourage informal workers at small firms to save more.
El periodico de Perú, El Comercio, reporta el estudio de IPA sobre los efectos del matching contribution en los ahorros previsionales de los empleados. Investigadores de la U. del Maryland y Universidad del Pacifico están testeando si el matching contribution incentiva mayores...
