the face of adverse shocks. However, savings rates tend to be low in many countries, including Mexico (4.2 percent).<sup>4</sup> In response to these concerns, many governments, employers, non-profit organizations and even commercial banks have started to provide financial literacy courses with the aim to improve financial education. However, participation rates for non-compulsory financial education programs are typically extremely low. Willis (2011, p. 430) sums this up as “Voluntary financial education is widely available today, yet seldom used”. For example, Brown and Gartner (2007) examine pilot experimental efforts by three credit card providers in the United States to provide online financial literacy training to delinquent and at-risk credit card holders, as well as to college students who had newly received credit cards. Target Financial Services made calls to 80,982 at-risk cardholders, reaching only 6,417 of them, of which half were invited to use a credit education website: only 684 of these requested a code to log-on, of which only 28 used the code to log on and only 2 people completed the course. U.S. Bank had only 384 cardholders out of the 42,000 it attempted to reach complete its online program (0.9 percent). Wells Fargo offered college students a 60-minute phone card as an incentive to do the training, and had the highest response rate, with 6.7 percent of college student cardholders offered the treatment logging into the website, and 6.5 percent completing the training.

Thus despite financial education programs becoming increasingly popular among policy-makers and financial providers, they appear to be deeply unpopular among customers. This raises two interrelated questions which are important for research and policy. The first is whether there are economic or behavioral constraints which prevent more individuals participating in such programs? The second question is whether there are any benefits to these marginal individuals from doing so, or whether they are rationally choosing not to participate in such training?

We investigate these questions through the context of randomized experiments conducted in Mexico City. We collaborated with a financial institution to evaluate a free financial literacy course offered on a large-scale. We document that there is relatively little interest in such a program among the general population, and then screen recruited subjects on interest in participating. We then randomly selected half of the interested individuals to be invited to the course. The initial participation rate in the course was low (18 percent) even among the sample of interested individuals. Motivated by different theoretical and logistics reasons why individuals may not attend training, we randomized the treatment group into different subgroups, which received treatments designed to provide evidence on some key barriers to take-up. These treatments included monetary payments for attendance, deferred payments,

> 4 This number is based on data from the 2008 Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH). It corresponds to the average household savings rate (total income-total expenditures/total income) using sampling weights and dropping those with savings rates below -100 percent and above 100 percent. The average household saving rate using _monetary_ income and expenditures is 11.4 percent.

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