TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lybbert, Travis J
AU  - Wydick, Bruce
TI  - Hope as Aspirations, Agency, and Pathways: Poverty Dynamics and Microfinance in Oaxaca, Mexico
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22661
PY  - 2016
Y2  - September 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22661
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22661
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22661.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Travis Lybbert
Agricultural and Resources Economics
University of California, Davis
1 Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
E-Mail: tlybbert@ucdavis.edu

Bruce Wydick
Department of Economics
University of San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94117
E-Mail: wydick@usfca.edu
M1  - published as Travis J. Lybbert, Bruce Wydick. "Hope as Aspirations, Agency, and Pathways: Poverty Dynamics and Microfinance in Oaxaca, Mexico," in Christopher B. Barrett, Michael R. Carter, and Jean-Paul Chavas, editors, "The Economics of Poverty Traps" University of Chicago Press (2019)

M3  - presented at "The Economics of Asset Accumulation and Poverty Traps", June 28-29, 2016
AB  - 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.
ER  -