Savings revisited: a replication study of a savings intervention in Malawi

We replicate and reanalyse data from the randomised controlled trial of a programme originally carried out by Brune and colleagues to facilitate formal savings for Malawian tobacco farmers. The results from their study indicate that offering farmers access to personal savings accounts increased farmers? banking transactions and enhanced the well-being of their households. Our pure replication, as well as our estimation analyses, support the conclusions from the original study. We also conducted a separate analysis focussing on the subset of farmers who chose to make use of the savings vehicles offered. We found that this subset of farmers, compared with the overall treatment group, had far greater positive effects on their agricultural output.