Michael Callen is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics form the University of California, San Diego
The research team considers the ability of mobile salary payments in Afghanistan to mitigate constraints on workers and businesses such as weak security, reliability, and efficiency by examining the deployment of a service that allows Afghan firms to pay salaries directly to employees' mobile phones.
We provide evidence that violence reduces the adoption and use of mobile money in three separate empirical settings in Afghanistan. First, analyzing nationwide mobile money transaction logs, we find that users exposed to violence reduce use of mobile money.
Despite substantial interest in the potential for mobile money to positively impact the lives of the poor, little empirical evidence exists to substantiate these claims.