6 percent of the economically active population is employed by the government and just 8 percent of individuals aged 15 and older have a post-secondary education (Ghana Statistical Service, 2013, 2012). Our respondents reported an average monthly income of GHS 770, or $358 at a 2013 exchange rate of GHS 2.15 per $1, had GHS 240-250 in savings with NVRB, and GHS 1,628 in cash savings across all sources.<sup>5</sup> Although our respondents have desirable jobs, they are still economically vulnerable: one-third of the respondents reported that children in their care miss school due to late school fees “often” or “sometimes”, 71 percent reported that they often or sometimes worry about having enough money to pay monthly bills, and 61 percent stated that they are “socially taxed”, in that they often or sometimes have difficulty saying no to requests from others.

Salaried workers are valuable bank customers in Ghana. Regularly-recurring salary payments allow banks to reliably deduct loan fees, interest, and principal directly from the customer’s account, and bank accounts offering salary advances or overdraft facilities to customers who receive electronic payments are common. At NVRB, salaried customers may receive an overdraft by completing a requisition form at the bank branch. NVRB then permits the customer to take a cash withdrawal equal to the overdraft amount, which turns the customer’s bank balance negative. At the time of the experiment, overdrafts incurred a fixed GHS 5 service fee plus a variable fee equal to 18 percent of the overdraft amount. Since most overdrafts are cleared in less than one month, these loans have exceptionally high effective interest rates.<sup>6</sup> Workers in our sample made extensive use of overdrafts at baseline: Fifty-eight percent of respondents overdrafted at least once in the year before baseline, with the average overdrafter paying GHS 226 ($105) in fees and interest over the same period. Appendix Figure A1 graphs the distribution of overdrafts.

Individuals who use costly, short-term credit are particularly likely to have time inconsistency problems (Meier and Sprenger, 2010; Gathergood, 2012). As such, we stratified our randomization by baseline overdrafting behavior (as well as gender and bank branch) because we were interested in studying heterogeneity in treatment effects by overdrafter status.<sup>7</sup> Before randomizing we constructed an index of overdrafting behavior and defined those

> 5Total baseline cash savings include savings at NVRB, savings at other banks, microfinance institutions, and credit unions, savings with group savings clubs, savings with agricultural co-ops, savings held by susu collectors, money lenders, other individuals, and cash kept at home.

> 6Seventy-six percent of the overdrafts taken out by our study sample were cleared within 31 days and 90 percent were cleared in 93 days. As a matter of policy, NVRB only formally approves overdrafts for one or two months.

> 7The baseline survey also asked respondents to make hypothetical choices between different amounts of money at different times, but there were only two opportunities for respondents to make a quasi-hyperbolic preference reversal and choices were unincentivized. In practice, just 3.8 percent of respondents made two reversals, while 20 percent of respondents made one reversal. Given the weaknesses of the survey-based measure, we do not use it in the main analysis and instead focus on heterogeneity in overdrafting behavior.

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