# **3.3 How effective is Zoom training?**

Did business owners learn anything from online training, implement what they had learned, and experience changes in business outcomes? We answer these questions using our 2- month follow-up survey, presenting intention-to-treat estimates in Table 2. There is a statistically significant, but small impact of 2.4 percentage points on business knowledge as measured by an 11-question test. This is consistent with the small effects on test-assessed knowledge seen in in-person business training and financial education programs (Carpena et al., 2019; McKenzie and Puerto, 2021).

To measure the impact on business practices, we implement a slightly modified version of the practices in McKenzie and Woodruff (2017). We measure 22 business practices consisting of 9 marketing practices (e.g. monitors competitor’s prices, uses special offers), 10 accounting practices (e.g. keep written records, separates household and business accounts), and 3 planning practices (e.g. has a written budget, sets sales goals). The control group are doing 50.2 percent of these practices, and we find that being assigned to treatment results in a statistically significant improvement of 5.4 percentage points. The magnitude of improvement is similar to the impact of an in-person course like the ILO SIYB course (McKenzie and Woodruff, 2017). The largest improvement comes in planning practices (11.7 percentage points), followed by accounting practices (6.9 percentage points). In contrast, the impact on marketing practices is small (1.6 percentage points) and statistically insignificant. We also find a small and statistically insignificant improvement in an index of personal initiative based on Campos et al. (2017). These results accord with our qualitative interviews, where personal initiative and marketing were the topics least remembered by participants, while finance and planning had the highest recall.

There is some evidence that this improvement in business practices is accompanied by shortterm improvements in business sales. When measured in levels, monthly sales increase by 4,113 pesos ($240) relative to a control mean of 17,023 pesos, a 24 percent increase. 90 percent of control firms and 91.9 percent of treated firms are open at the time of the 2- month survey (Table C.1), and those that are closed are coded as having zero sales. Taking log sales conditional on being open and making positive sales, the increase is 11.2 percent, which is not statistically significant. Monthly profits increase by 648 pesos ($38), which is 10 percent of the control mean and not statistically significant.

In Appendix B we examine robustness of these results to attrition and outliers. We show the impacts are similar if we probability re-weight for attrition, and if we employ the Behaghel et al. (2015) approach of dropping the most difficult to contact treated firms to equalize response rates with control firms. Our business practice results are more robust to the possibility that the additional control group attritors are better than average than is the impact on sales. To examine how much our results are being driven by a few observations, we use the approximate maximum influence perturbation approach of Broderick et al. (2023) to see how sensitive the results are to removing a small fraction of the data. Table B.5 shows our business practice impacts are quite robust to selectively removing data (we would need to selectively drop almost 3.7 percent of the sample to change the sign), whereas the sales impact would change sign by dropping only 1.7 percent of the sample.

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