Laura Aquino

Laura Aquino is a Summer in the Field Fellow, 2023 and a current Ph.D. candidate in the Economics program at Boston University. She has published research on married women’s property laws and financial inclusion in Mexico. Emily’s main research interests are development, gender and labor economics.

For her Summer in the Field Fellowship, Laura will collect data on the spending and savings behavior of consumers to determine whether access to the banking system has changed households’ expenditure, investment, and savings composition. The information is in restricted versions of the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure, but the National Institute of Statistics and Geography grants access to restricted and disaggregated data as a researcher and doctoral student through their microdata laboratory, only accessible in person in Mexico City.  Last summer, Laura traveled to Mexico City to obtained monthly data from the National Banking and Securities Commission about which convenience stores were authorized to act as banking agents from 2012 to 2022, as well as detailed information about the number of ATMs, branches, transactions, and the number and balance of all deposit accounts at the municipality level. With data collected this summer and last, she will analyze the impact of a financial inclusion reform on consumer savings, spending, and transaction behavior in Mexico.