{"id":2470,"date":"2011-06-21T05:00:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T09:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=2470"},"modified":"2011-06-21T09:31:22","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T13:31:22","slug":"mobile-banking-the-impact-of-m-pesa-in-kenya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2470","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Banking: The Impact of M-Pesa in Kenya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new <a title=\"Mbiti and Weil (NBER, 2011)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w17129\" target=\"_blank\">working paper<\/a> by Isaac Mbiti and David N. Weil:<!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8220;M-Pesa is a mobile phone based money transfer system in Kenya which grew at a blistering pace following its inception in 2007. We examine how M-Pesa is used as well as its economic impacts. Analyzing data from two waves of individual data on financial access in Kenya, we find that increased use of M-Pesa lowers the propensity of people to use informal savings mechanisms such as ROSCAS, but raises the probability of their being banked. Using aggregate data, we calculate the velocity of M-Pesa at between 11.0 and 14.6 person-to-person transfers per month. In addition, we find that M-Pesa causes decreases in the prices of competing money transfer services such as Western Union. While we find little evidence that people use their M-Pesa accounts as a place to store wealth, our results suggest that M-Pesa improves individual outcomes by promoting banking and increasing transfers.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new working paper by Isaac Mbiti and David N. Weil:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,55,49,12],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-2470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-economics","category-impact-evaluation","category-policy","tag-microfinance","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-DQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2470"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4560,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470\/revisions\/4560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}