In Simple Words
Imagine a worker who wants to save money back home, but knows any cash sent directly will be spent by relatives on non-essentials. Giving the worker a bank account where they retain sole or joint legal control allows them to deposit savings safely while maintaining oversight from afar.
US-based Salvadoran migrants
- No new account offer
- Group used for comparison
- Joint and migrant-only accounts offered
- More savings at partner bank
Partner-bank savings over 12 months. Randomized account offers plus marketing: full package, not sole-account effect alone. Other offer arms omitted.
See source →Study conditions — Ashraf and colleagues, 2015 ↗Research question
Overseas migrants often hesitate to send excess savings to home-country relatives due to principal-agent problems and fear that funds will be misallocated or prematurely consumed.
Participants
Transnational households of Salvadoran international migrants living in the United States and their origin-country families.
Study Design
Randomized field experiment offering target savings accounts with varying degrees of sole versus joint migrant ownership and monitoring control (Ashraf et al. 2015).
Results
Enhancing migrant monitoring and direct ownership over origin-country savings accounts leads to statistically significant increases in total accumulated savings held in the home country.
Takeaway
Design cross-border financial products that grant overseas remittance senders direct legal control or joint monitoring over destination bank accounts.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Statistically significant
A label used when a result passes a chosen statistical threshold, often p < 0.05. It does not show how large or useful an effect is. A result that is not statistically significant does not prove there is no effect.
ExampleA study reports p = 0.03 against a 0.05 threshold. It passes that test, but the effect could still be too small to matter.
American Statistical Association · Statement on p-values ↗Read more about statistically significant →