Essays at the intersection of behavioral and development economics

This dissertation applies experimental methods and behavioral theories to the study of development. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the determinants of savings behavior in developing countries using both lab and field experiments in the Philippines, and Chapter 3 analyzes the determinants of trusting behavior in experiments in South Africa, Russia and Boston.; In Chapter 1, I employ a new experimental design to examine two poorly understood factors in household spending and savings decisions: private information and communication between spouses. I find that men's decisions are highly responsive to changes in randomly assigned conditions of information and communication: in private, the majority of men choose to save in their own accounts. In public, when their wives find out about their decision but can not affect it beforehand by communicating, men choose to consume their income. In negotiation, after communication with their spouse, the majority of men decide to save their income in their wives' account.; In Chapter 2 (co-authored with Dean Karlan and Wesley Yin) we designed a commitment savings product and offered it to a randomly chosen subset of clients of a rural bank in the Philippines; 28.4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account.; We find that women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current tradeoffs, as measured in a baseline survey, were more likely to open the commitment savings account. After twelve months, average savings balances at the partnering bank increased by 80 percent for those who were offered the commitment savings product relative to the control group.; Chapter 3 (co-authored with Iris Bohnet and Nikita Piankov), examines what motivates trusting behavior, even when it does not pay monetarily. In experiments run in three countries, we find that only about one third of the subjects who trust expect to make money and that reciprocity matters in the United States but hardly in Russia and South Africa. We find, instead, that trust and trustworthiness behavior is significantly related to warm-glow kindness on average, although there is substantial heterogeneity in motivation.