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Innovation Profile: Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World

Email Mindy | Visit Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World

UPDATE MAY 2011

The outcome of Mindy's innovation year has been published on CFED's newly-redesigned Behavioral Economics site, found here.

During Mindy's residency, she partnered with three different asset building practitioners - two tax preparation sites and a "Bank On" program - to design and test program tweaks informed by research in the field of behavioral economics. With each organization, she walked through the programs' goals and processes to target critical leverage points, propose behaviorally-informed design changes and evaluate intervention as rigorously as possible. Applying Behavioral Research to Asset-Building Initiatives describes the interventions, research, and lessons learned from by applying behavioral insights to asset building programs.

Update: July 2010

CFED is currently partnering with Mindy on developing specialized Behavioral Economics technical assistance to improve the participation of self‐employed households in the services and products provided through CFED’s Self Employment Tax Initiative (SETI). SETI was launched in 2005 to support microentrepreneurs using tax time to strengthen their businesses with asset-building opportunities and to use that interface to connect them with other business support services. Two SETI innovation sites - Foundation Communities in Austin, Texas and the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition - are receiving customized Behavioral Economics technical assistance and are partnering with Mindy and her research colleagues to study the effects of their programmatic experiments.

Mindy’s project is also exploring opportunities to assist the cities of San Francisco and Washington, DC with their initiatives to bring low‐ and moderate‐income residents into the financial mainstream through direct deposit and banking access initiatives. In addition, she has collaborated with CFED to create a website and blog – “Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World” – that serves as a home for a rich and evolving set of resources for anyone interested in policy and programmatic applications of behavioral insights. The blog includes guest posts from practitioners and researchers who are experimenting with behaviorally-informed interventions, providing a channel for those findings to be disseminated to the broader field and for practitioners to communicate directly with their peers.

About the Innovation

Mindy is connecting research in the behavioral sciences to real-world challenges in the asset-building field. She will carry out behavioral consulting and design research with CFED and practitioner organizations. With an emphasis on data, documentation and knowledge dissemination, this innovation will lead to improvements that make policy, market and practice initiatives work more effectively.

About the Innovator

Mindy has an extensive background in research, having served as a senior research specialist for Princeton University and Ideas42, a project of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. She is also the Founder of One Decision.

Tags: Aging, Credit & Finance, Financial Education, Saving & Investment, Underserved