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Mark Walsh

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Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Choosing Your Words Wisely? Filtered Communication and Mobile Banking Information Diffusion in Pakistan

In low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs), information about promising technologies often diffuses slowly. One explanation for this phenomenon is that LMIC households face financial or reputational risks when recommending technologies. In this project, We will test interventions to spur communication about a promising new technology, low-fee digital savings accounts. We will seed information about this technology with households in Pakistani villages and vary the financial and reputational risks of recommending digital savings accounts to peers. We hope to learn whether households withhold information about digital savings accounts, how this affects village-level diffusion, and the relative importance of financial and reputational risks as mechanisms.


Mark Walsh, Department of Economics

mark walsh

Mark Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Economics Department and a Koret Fellow at Stanford University. Prior to starting his PhD, he received a BA in Economics and an MA in Public Policy, with a focus on international development, from Stanford University, and worked as a research assistant at the Abdul-Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). While working for JPAL in Ghana, he and his collaborators became interested in early childhood education and began two field projects aimed at improving the quality of early childhood education in Ghana. Since coming to Stanford, his primary research focus has been digital finance in low and middle-income countries. Walsh's projects aim to inform policymakers so they can enable those living in poverty to take advantage of the opportunities presented by digital finance. To this end, he is studying digital job platforms in India, digital merchant payments in Tanzania, and mobile banking platforms in Pakistan.

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