these were randomly assigned at the respondent level, and we examine different combinations of these three treatments. In what follows, we provide a summary of the treatments, and we refer the reader to Carpena et al. (2017) for a more detailed discussion of the experiment design.

# **_2.1. Financial Education_**

Our main experimental intervention is a video-based financial education program which we offered to a randomly selected two-thirds of all study participants. The other one-third formed a control group and were offered health training. We chose to assign the control group to health education instead of no training at all as doing so allows us to account for Hawthorne effects. These effects may be especially important in our research setting, as the program we consider was quite intensive: whereas many existing studies examine only a short one-off financial training session,<sup>3</sup> the financial education program in our experiment is longer and was carried out over five weekly meetings, each lasting 2 to 3 hours. With such in-depth curriculum, providing the control participants with health education was therefore necessary to maintain the same level of everyday disruption across all respondents throughout the study.

The financial education program screened videos on five topics, namely, budgeting, savings, loans, insurance, and financial management. For consistency, the health education program also used videos and discussed five topics unrelated to financial knowledge, that is, cleanliness and hygiene; midwifery; maternal and child health; condoms, AIDS and syphilis; and night-blindness.<sup>4</sup> To further ensure comparability across study subjects, both the financial and health training sessions were implemented using the same logistic approach. For example, both financial and health training sessions were carried out in a classroom environment, where each class met at the same time every week and consisted of about 20 respondents assigned to the same type of program.<sup>5</sup> All participants likewise received a show-up fee of Rs. 50 (approximately US$ 1) for every session they attended as well as free transportation to and from the training center.

# **_2.2. Concrete Financial Goal Setting_**

Our second intervention, concrete financial goal setting, encouraged participants to set short-term achievable but non-compulsory financial goals. This treatment involved a household visit with the following three elements: (1) respondents were interviewed about their use of financial services; (2) respondents were asked to voluntarily choose a target date for completing one or more financial

> 3 For instance, Miller et al. (2014) find in their meta-analysis that more than one-third of financial education programs are delivered within one week or less.

> 4 The financial education videos were based on standard materials previously used in the literature, but they were adapted to our context by a local media company together with input from the research team and our local research and implementation partners. The health education videos were produced by the United Nations in India.

> 5 The study was carried out over several waves, and in each wave of the study, there were about 15 classes. Of these, 10 classes were for financial education, and the remaining 5 classes were for health training. All financial and health classes were likewise facilitated by a trained instructor, who answered outstanding questions about the videos as well as promoted discussion on the course topics.

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