goals, namely, opening a savings account, increasing savings, reducing expenditure, and/or purchasing insurance; and (3) enumerators listed the respondents’ target dates on a calendar — provided at no cost by the study — and posted the calendar in the respondent’s home, as a reminder of their self-chosen but non-binding financial goal.

We administered the above goal setting treatment by design to a randomly selected half of all respondents assigned to financial education. In so doing, we are able to estimate the marginal effect of the goal setting treatment beyond financial education alone. The other half then served to separate the effects of the goal setting exercise versus a household visit. In particular, this group received the same household interview about financial services over the same field work period, but they were not asked to set financial goals and were not given calendars. As a consequence, the impacts of the goal setting intervention that we measure represent the combined effect of both the target dates and the provision of free calendars to respondents.

# **_2.3. Financial Counseling_**

Our third treatment, financial counseling _,_ consisted of one-on-one instruction and individualized advice, carried out free of charge at the participant’s home. Specifically, skilled financial counselors — trained rigorously by the Center for Microfinance, our research partner in India — guided participants on money management depending on their specific needs. For example, counselors assisted respondents in preparing a budget, gathering documents for opening a bank account, or contacting an insurance provider. This counseling treatment was offered to a randomly selected half of subjects in the financial education group, orthogonally to goal setting. Shortly after goal setting treatment and control activities were completed, all subjects assigned to counseling received one household visit per month from the counselor for four months. Beyond these monthly visits, counseling services were primarily demand-driven; more frequent counseling meetings were available at the respondent’s request.

# **_2.4. Summary Statistics_**

The data in this study come from two household surveys: first, a baseline survey before the start of the interventions, and second, an endline survey almost ten months after the final session of the video-based education program. To accommodate the large number of respondents, the sample was split into separate waves. Respondents were drawn from various neighborhoods (“chalis”) that were mutually exclusive across waves, and all treatments were stratified based on the respondent’s gender, neighborhood, and whether he or she is currently a microfinance client. Attrition between baseline and endline is quite low at only 6% and is uncorrelated with treatment.

Table 1 outlines our study sample (N = 959) as well as the proportion of respondents assigned to each treatment combination.<sup>6</sup> As can be seen in the table, 18% were allocated to receive only

> 6 In comparison to Carpena et al. (2017), the sample we use for this study contains fewer observations because we focus on the set of respondents for which we have endline measures of financial numeracy, awareness, and attitudes.

7