Working Paper: NBER ID: w22661
Authors: Travis J. Lybbert; Bruce Wydick
Abstract: Work in positive psychology decomposes hope into aspirations, agency, and pathways. Operating in the context of an economic model developed with this framework, we review the literature on hope from philosophy, theology, psychology, and its relationship to emerging work on aspirations in development economics. We then present one-month follow-up results from an experimental study based on a hope intervention in Oaxaca, Mexico among 601 indigenous women with access to microfinance loans. Our early experimental results suggest that the intervention raised aspirations approximately a quarter of a standard deviation, significantly raised a hope index among the treated subjects, and had positive but statistically insignificant results on enterprise revenues and profits.
Keywords: hope; poverty dynamics; microfinance; aspirations; agency
JEL Codes: O12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| hope intervention (I24) | aspirations (Y60) |
| hope intervention (I24) | hope index (C43) |
| hope intervention (I24) | agency (L85) |
| hope intervention (I24) | pathways (Y80) |
| hope intervention (I24) | log sales (M41) |
| hope intervention (I24) | log profits (D33) |
| hope intervention (I24) | log community bank savings (G21) |