About

Marcel Fafchamps is a member of the Advisory Board at the Center for African Studies at Stanford University. The page does not provide specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Finance
• Statistics
• Medical education
• Family medicine
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Mathematics
• Financial system

Selected publications

• Intertemporal risk pooling in village economies

  Journal of Development Economics · 2025-11-20 · 2 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Diffusion in Social Networks Experimental Evidence on Information Sharing vs Persuasion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Competition and Management Upgrading: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-06-01

  reportOpen access

  We experimentally test two seminal hypotheses on the impact of competition on firms' management upgrading.In a first experiment, we protect firms from labor market competition by reducing the risk that a freshly trained manager would be poached by a rival firm.We find that this protection does not increase firms' investment in management training.In a second suite of experiments, we boost perceived product market competition by informing firms either that rival firms have received management training or that foreign firms are gaining easier access to the domestic market.Again, we find no evidence that this increases firms' average willingness to invest in management training.To explain why firms do not feel threatened by competition, we present evidence suggesting that, in contrast to commonly held assumptions, firm managers in our setting hold a mental model of competition that posits positive-instead of negative-spillovers, arising primarily from differentiation.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Observability and Demand for Transfers: Experimental Evidence from a Low Income Population

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diffusion in social networks: Experimental evidence on information sharing vs persuasion

  Journal of Development Economics · 2025-11-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Competition and Management Upgrading: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Matching Frictions and Distorted Beliefs: Evidence from a Job Fair Experiment

  The Economic Journal · 2025-04-21 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract We evaluate the impacts of a randomised job fair intervention in which jobseekers and employers can meet at low cost. The intervention generates few hires, but it lowers participants’ expectations and causes both firms and workers to invest more in search as predicted by a theoretical model; this improves employment outcomes for less educated jobseekers. Through a unique two-sided belief-elicitation survey, we confirm that firms and jobseekers have overoptimistic expectations about the market. This suggests that, beyond slowing down matching, search frictions have a second understudied cost: they entrench inaccurate beliefs, further distorting search strategies and labour-market outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diffusion in Social Networks Experimental Evidence on Information Sharing vs Persuasion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Keeping Up Appearances: An Experimental Investigation of Relative Rank Signaling

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Demand for Commitment in Credit and Saving Contracts: A Field Experiment

  The Economic Journal · 2024-06-12 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract We conduct a field experiment in which we offer credit and saving contracts to the same pool of Pakistani microfinance clients. Additional treatments test ex ante demand for soft commitment (in the form of reminders, either to respondents or to their families), hard commitment (in the form of a penalty for missing an instalment) and flexibility (an option to postpone an instalment) to save or pay loan instalments on time. We find substantial demand for fixed repayment contracts in both the credit and savings domains, in ways that imply that respondents value the commitment required. While we find little or no average demand for additional contractual features, we nonetheless observe that different combinations of contractual add-ons are preferred depending on the respondent’s level of financial discipline. Respondents with high financial discipline prefer flexibility in credit contracts when combined with reminders to self while those with low discipline value penalties in savings contracts only when paired with reminders. Our results imply that, for the average microfinance client, demand for commitment is met through the regular payment schedule built into standard microcredit or commitment savings contracts. However, combining penalties or flexibility with reminders may appeal to certain subsets of clients.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Simon Quinn

  325 shared

• Måns Söderbom

  74 shared

• Albert Zeufack

  66 shared

• Remco Oostendorp

  66 shared

• Farah Said

  65 shared

• Uzma Afzal

  Government College University, Faisalabad

  64 shared

• Jan Willem Gunning

  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  63 shared

• Stefan Dercon

  University of Oxford

  61 shared

Awards & honors

• outstanding PhD thesis award from the American Agricultural…