American sample). In particular, the Global Findex database includes two sets of questions to each surveyed individual which are essential for our purposes of measuring � and �:

- Question FIN24 asks: “Now, imagine that you have an emergency and you need to pay [1/20 of GNI per capita in local currency]. Is it possible or not possible that you could come up with [1/20 of GNI per capita in local currency] within the next month?”The possible answers were “yes”or “no”.<sup>24</sup> We use this question, like in the second group of studies which rely on self-assessed measures of capacity to deal with ...nancial shocks, to calculate the share of HtM individuals, �.

- Questions FIN37 and FIN38 ask if “[i]n the past 12 months, have you, personally, received any ...nancial support from the government? This money could include payments for educational or medical expenses, unemployment bene...ts, subsidy payments, or any kind of social bene...ts. Please do not include wages or any payments related to work”and “[i]n the past 12 months, have you, personally, received a pension from the government, military, or public sector?”, respectively. The possible answers were “yes”or “no”. We use these questions to identify the share of social transfers reaching HtM individuals, �.

# 4.2 Share of HtM individuals is more than twice as large in emerging markets

Figure 2 shows the share of HtM individuals, �, in each country. Red bars depict emerging markets while blue bars indicate developed countries. For ease of reading, countries with labels correspond to those used in our sample of six Latin American and 17 developed ones. The visual impression is striking: a majority of blue bars lie to the left of the ...gure and the majority of red bars lie to the right (indicating a larger share of HtM individuals in emerging countries). In fact, the average share of HtM individuals is twice as large in emerging countries as in developed countries (47.5 percent vs. 23.8 percent, with a statistically signi...cant di¤erence). For our sample of six Latin American countries, the average share of HtM individuals is even larger, reaching 60 percent.<sup>25</sup> While using a di¤erent period of coverage, measure, and identi...cation strategy, this evidence seems to match fairly well that of country-speci...c studies. For example, for Mexico, we ...nd that 72 percent of individuals are HtM and Cugat (2019) ...nds that for years 2016-2018 about 58 percent of Mexican households have no access to formal ...nancial markets. For the United States, we ...nd that 27 percent of individuals are HtM and Kaplan et al. (2014) ...nd that for the period 1989-2010 between 25 and 40 percent of American households are HtM, with their preferred estimate being one-third. For Korea, we ...nd that 20 percent of individuals are HtM and Song (2019) ...nds that

> 24 In the case of the United States, this 1/20 of GNI per capita in local currency for the year 2017 was equivalent to 2,380 dollars which is very similar to Lusardi et al. (2011).

> 25 It is worth noting that the Global Findex survey of 2014 would reach virtually identical results regarding the share of HtM individuals, �, with emerging (developed) countries showing slightly lower (higher) values of �, of about 2 percentage points.

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