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The Empowerment Lab at CID

Research

Supported Research

A core part of the Empowerment Lab's work is to support research that expands the boundaries of our knowledge about access to markets for the underserved.

The Empowerment Lab has created partnerships with organizations and private sector firms willing to make available a rich set of real-time, global consumer transaction data for use by Empowerment Lab researchers. These data partnerships expand the space of what can be researched and help us understand what hinders access to markets and produce sustainable solutions.

Below are examples of research associated with the Empowerment Lab:

Entrepreneurial Finance Lab

Asim Khwaja (Harvard Kennedy School), Bailey Klinger (Program Director, Harvard Kennedy School)

The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) is a research project dedicated to unlocking the entrepreneurial potential of the world's missing middle. While small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are a large driver of the economy in developed countries, this segment of the economy is largely missing in developing countries because of the barriers entrepreneurs face in accessing finance. To reduce these barriers, the EFL is developing a range of screening technologies that will allow banks and venture capitalists to identify high-potential entrepreneurs cheaply and easily.

For more on how the EFL is helping the missing middle access financial markets, visit the EFL website.

Remittances and the Problem of Control: A Field Experiment among Migrants from El Salvador

Nava Ashraf (Harvard Business School), Diego Aycinena (Francisco Marroquin University), Claudia Martinez (University of Chile), and Dean Yang (University of Michigan)

Migration creates changes in household structure that affect financial decision making, in large part by exacerbating information asymmetries between migrants and families left behind. This research uses a randomized field experiment to investigate the importance of migrant control over the use of remittances. We conduct baseline surveys on migrants and their corresponding remittance-receiving households in El Salvador; we then randomly assign these matched pairs to different financial products. In partnership with a large Salvadoran bank, we offer US-based migrants from El Salvador the opportunity to channel remittances into savings accounts in their home country. Migrants are randomly accounts which vary in the degree of control the migrant has over El Salvador-based savings. This project contributes to knowledge in two areas. First, it expands our currently limited knowledge about the determinants of international remittance flows, which have emerged in recent years as the largest and fastest-growing type of international financial flow to developing countries. Second, it contributes to the literature on intra-household resource allocation and decision making, by documenting a demand on the part of migrants for greater control over the use of remittances sent to households in their country of origin. The project provides for a direct form of empowering migrants in the US: through providing them with greater control over their savings and remittances.

See our Grants page for more information.