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Fintech and household resilience to shocks: Evidence from digital loans in Kenya. Journal of Development Economics 153 (2021): 102697. Abstract.","title":"Fintech and household resilience to shocks: Evidence from digital loans in Kenya","url":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102697","date":"2021-11-01","written_by":"independent","quote":"The loans improve household resilience: households are 6.3 percentage points less likely to forego expenses due to negative shocks."},{"kind":"preprint","citation":"Bharadwaj P, Jack W, Suri T. Fintech and Household Resilience to Shocks: Evidence from Digital Loans in Kenya. NBER Working Paper 25604, February 2019. The working paper version of the same study adds the design, the sample and the description of the credit score. 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Commercial Bank of Africa and Safaricom launched it in 2012 as a savings and loan account on the M-PESA mobile money service. M-Shwari assigns each new customer a credit score from phone and M-PESA data, and only customers above a fixed cutoff can borrow. The authors compared customers who opened accounts from January to March 2015 with scores just above and just below the cutoff. They surveyed them by phone between September 2016 and January 2017. Of those eligible, 34% took a loan, and the loans did not replace other credit. Eligible households were 6.3 percentage points less likely to forgo expenses after a negative shock. About 68% of the comparison group had forgone some expenses. The Journal of Development Economics published the study in November 2021. 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