# **5. Data and Empirical Strategy**

We use data from 3 different sources. First, the questionnaire filled by auditors after each visit which covers various aspects of the visit, including the length of the visit, the products offered and their features, and quality of the service provided. Second, the printed materials that the staff handed to the auditor, consisting of either leaflets about the product or, less frequently, personalized amortization tables when credit was requested. For credit, out of the 54 printed materials given to the auditors, 49 were advertisements and generic leaflets, while only 5 were personalized amortization tables. The third data source comes from CONDUSEF and it consists of a dataset with the terms of all the savings and credit products offered by the institutions at the time of the study. Many of the terms were not available online and had to be requested directly from the institution. The dataset only includes credit products with loan sizes in the range requested by the auditors, and savings products that can be contracted with an initial deposit of 5,000 Pesos. These data are used to generate Table 1 and to match the products that were actually offered to the auditors to compare their cost against the rest of products offered by the institution.

We use data from the questionnaire, printed materials and CONDUSEF to construct variables related to the amount of information provided by the institutions. We divide the information into the following categories: legal requirements to open the account or to take out the loan, terms of account, and fees and commissions—most of which depend on usage and are therefore avoidable. The items of information that the staff could provide for each category vary by product.

For savings products, the items in “legal requirements” include the need to show (i) an official identification number and (ii) an address certificate. The items in “terms of the account” include (i) whether or not the client needs to be a member of the institution to open an account; (ii) the minimum balance required to open an account; (iii) the maturity of the account; (iv) whether a debit card is provided; (v) the interest rate offered and whether it is fixed or variable; (vi) the total annual earnings (GAT); (vii) the deposit insurance tax and (viii) the tax on earnings. The “fees and commissions” include: (i) fee if average balance falls below minimum balance; (ii) inactivity fee; (iii) early withdrawal fee for investment accounts; (iv) withdrawal fee; (v) balance inquiry fee and (vi) debit card reposition fees. In sum, the “legal requirements” and “terms of the account” include requirements and unavoidable costs to open the account while “fees and commissions” are additional costs that can be avoided through usage behavior.

> and Low Indebtedness), (Neophyte and High Indebtedness) and (Neophyte and Low Indebtedness). The 6 scripts used for savings auditors are similar, replacing High Indebtedness by Preference for Investment account and Low Indebtedness by Preference for Checking account. As mentioned, each credit auditor was assigned one script, while savings auditors were assigned to be either Experienced or Neophytes, and to have a preference for either an investment account or a checking account, but if they were assigned the Experienced profile, they alternated between High and Low Competition scripts.

12