as before. The variable takes the value -1 if the individual responded “No, it’s a bad time,” 0 if the individual responded “It’s neither a good nor a bad time,” and +1 if the individual responded “Yes, it’s a good time.” We include three additional questions using this same language, but instead of asking about durable expenditures, we ask about electronics, vehicles, and credit card borrowing, respectively.

One potential concern with our design is that the information treatments could affect behavior through a mechanism other than intertemporal optimization of consumption. Intuitively, information about inflation and the exchange rate could affect spending by changing respondents’ general optimism or pessimism about the economy. For example, individuals who learn that there will be inflation or depreciation in the future may infer that these are symptoms of an economic downturn and interpret this as bad news for their personal economic situation. We include two questions to shed light on this potential mechanism in the questionnaire. The first asks respondents about their expectations for the economy overall, the second asks about the individual’s own financial outlook: “Looking forward, would you say that you and your family living with you will be better off or worse off financially than you are now?” We code both outcomes using the same _{−_ 1 _,_ 0 _,_ +1 _}_ scale: -1 if the individual responds “Worse off,” 0 if the individual responds “About the same,” and +1 if the individual responds “Better off.”

# **5 Data and Descriptive Statistics**

## **5.1 Sample and Survey Implementation**

We implemented the experiment over a 4-month period between April and July 2019. During this time, the survey team attempted to reach 28,958 credit card clients and completed 2,872 surveys, implying a 10% response rate.<sup>9</sup> The median respondent took 7 minutes to complete the interview. Surveys were offered in English and Malay, and 47% of respondents chose to complete the survey in English, while the remaining 53% responded in Malay. The partner bank shared detailed administrative records for all participants who responded to the survey, as well as a representative sample of clients who were invited to the survey but did not respond.

Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for our sample based on administrative data. Column (1) reports data for a random sample from the universe of the bank’s credit card clients, which includes both survey respondents and non-respondents. In this sample, 62% of clients are male,

> 9. This final sample excludes individuals who started the survey but did not make it to the end. There are only 174 partially complete surveys and we cannot reject the hypothesis that the respondents are missing at random after the information-provision stage of the survey. Our final sample excludes 274 individuals who reported extreme prior beliefs about the nominal exchange rate (above 4.65 or below 3.7 Ringgit per U.S. dollar) because the system used by the surveyors prevents us from knowing the exact expectations of those respondents. We would have excluded those extreme prior beliefs anyway to avoid sensitivity to outliers, as is standard in studies based on expectations data (Fuster et al., 2020).

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