Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya's Mobile Money Revolution
研究了移动货币创新降低交易成本对风险分担的影响，发现使用移动货币的家庭在遭受冲击时消费不受影响，而未使用者消费下降7%，机制是汇款增加和发送者多样化。
We explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption. In our panel sample, adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent. We find that, while shocks reduce consumption by 7 percent for nonusers, the consumption of user households is unaffected. The mechanisms underlying these consumption effects are increases in remittances received and the diversity of senders. We report robustness checks supporting these results and use the four-fold expansion of the mobile money agent network as a source of exogenous variation in access to the innovation.