Abstract:
This research analyses how violence affects financial decisions regarding mobile money in Kenya. I use evidence from Jack and Suri’s (2011) dataset about mobile money usage and combine it with conflict event data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The results, estimated by a fixed-effects model, show no significant impact of violence on mobile money. Also when introducing three different interaction variables based on household characteristics, the relation did not prove significant. It seems that financial decisions by Kenyan households are not affected by the levels of violence. Mobile money potentially provides security and safety for households to better deal with the uncertainties that go hand in hand with violence. Yet, much is still unknown in research about mobile money and so more evidence is needed with up-to-date data.
