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Financial literacy programs are popular, despite limited evidence that they lead to significant changes in savings behavior. We experimentally test the impact of financial literacy training on clients of a branchless banking program that offers doorstep access to banking to low income households. The intervention had significant impacts: total savings in the treatment group increased by 49% ($39) within a period of one year. The increase in savings is due in part to decreases in expenditures on temptation goods. These results suggest that financial education interventions can be successful in changing savings outcomes, though we are only able to speculate why the program worked in this context. 1 Acknowledgements: We thank FINO PayTech for implementing this program and Prakash Lal of FINO PayTech for his support. For comments, we thank Shawn Cole, Bilal Zia, William Jack, Sigfried Zottel, Toby Linden, and numerous conference and seminar participants, as well as two anonymous referees. For funding, we are grateful to the World Bank Russia Financial Literacy and Education Trust Fund. Calderone received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreements n. 263905 and n. 609402 (T2M). Finally, Mudita Tiwari, Anup Roy, and Sitaram Mukherjee provided excellent research assistance through CMF, IFMR Research. All opinions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of FINO PayTech or the World Bank.

Abstract:Weather shocks and natural disasters, it has been argued, represent a major threat to national and international security. Our paper contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflict by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan at different geographical and time scales between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict. Compared to the baseline, in the future the risk is expected to magnify in a range of 21 to 30 percent under a median scenario -taking into account uncertainties in both the climate projection and the estimate of the response of violence to temperature variations. Extreme temperature shocks are found to strongly affect the likelihood of violence as well, but the predictive power is hindered by substantial uncertainty. Our paper also sheds light on the vulnerability of areas with particular biophysical characteristics or with vulnerable populations. 1 We are grateful to Marshall Burke (University of California Berkeley) for sharing the projections from the 20 climate projection models and the three scenarios used in the projection exercise and to David Lister (University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) to provide the data on the location of the weather stations. Jose Funes provided valuable research assistance.

This paper looks at the spillover effects of grants under the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) on human capital investments in conflict-affected Northern Uganda. The YOP grant was primarily aimed at providing start-up money to groups of underemployed young people, and in practice worked similarly to an unconditional cash transfer. It kept a gender balance by mandating that groups should be at least one third female. Overall, the intervention had a significant impact on education-related expenditures, increasing them by 11-15 per cent (US$17-23) in the shorter and longer term (i.e. after two and four years). However, the educational expenditures of women did not increase. Female recipients seem not to have spent more on education, at least in part because of redistributive pressures such as probable financial requests from other members of their YOP group. These findings are relevant for future designs of group eligibility rules and for targeting of cash transfers.