HIV Testing and Saving

How does learning your HIV status affect your saving behavior? Rebecca Thornton reports on an ingenius study that set out to answer the question. The abstract reads:

According to economic life-cycle models, if learning HIV results is informative about additional years of life, being diagnosed HIV positive or negative should predict changes in consumption and savings. This paper examines the impact of learning HIV status on the savings of rural Malawians two years after testing. Using a field experiment that randomly assigned incentives to learn HIV results, HIV positives who learned their status were 27 percentage points less likely to save than HIV positives who did not learn their status. HIV negatives who learned their status saved significantly more than HIV negatives who did not learn their status. There were some differences in learning HIV positive or negative results among different age groups, but no difference between those with and without children. These findings contribute theoretically to our understanding of life-cycle consumption providing strong evidence that life expectancy, disease, and diagnoses have important effects on savings behaviors.

I'm printing out the paper now.