take-up is only 14%—a 77% decline in take-up relative to Private accounts ( _p_ <0.001). This indicates that the blocked accounts are substantially less desirable when their details would be revealed to the worker’s network.

We use survey data to examine workers’ self-reported reasons for the low take-up of Nonprivate accounts (Appendix Figure A4). Among those who declined a Non-private account, a striking 96% say that an important factor in their decision was that network members’ knowledge of the account would lead to an increase in net transfer requests. In addition, 46% say that they worried this would decrease their partner’s contribution to household expenses—also a component of redistributive pressure in our setting. In contrast, only 5% of workers cite any other reason as motivating their decision not to take up a Non-private account. We return to these ideas when we examine heterogeneous effects in Section 7.3, where we also directly examine the potential role of intra-household bargaining for our results. Overall, while only suggestive, these responses indicate that concerns about redistributive pressure were prominent in workers’ minds when refusing the Non-private accounts.<sup>25</sup> Among workers who take up a blocked account, 26% choose a threshold close to the minimum (i.e., a round number within 10% above their baseline earnings), while the remaining 74% select a threshold that is higher (see Appendix Figure A5). Overall, the median threshold chosen corresponds to 139% of mean baseline earnings. This is consistent with some desire to maintain flexibility in liquid earnings among workers—leaving room for workers to adjust labor supply to respond to cash needs in a given paycycle, while still allowing them to make use of the blocked accounts to save a subset of their earnings increases.<sup>26</sup> Despite the choice of fairly high thresholds, the accounts were actively used by workers. In Phase 1, workers who took up the accounts achieved savings in 28% of their paycyles on average. In Phase 2, among those who opened Private accounts, savings were deposited in 38% of paycycles. Note that since thresholds were usually set weakly above baseline earnings, these numbers under-estimate the fraction of paycycles in which workers earned more than their baseline earnings levels.

the accounts in Phase 1, 90% of those who are offered them again in Phase 2 take them up. Appendix Table A1 provides a full a tabulation of Phase 2 take-up by Phase 1 treatment status. Note that the high take-up rates of the Private accounts likely reflect several features of our setting: the large time investment (about 9 months) to establish trust in the factories before launching the experiment; the removal of many logistical barriers to opening and making deposits into accounts; and the lack of penalties in failing to make a target which lowered risk from participating in the accounts.

> 25We did not ask such questions of workers who were offered the Private accounts, so we cannot compare across the treatments. This is because we did not want to confuse the Private account workers by potentially making them worry that knowledge of the Private accounts would become known to their network.

> 26Because the decrease in the social tax is still above baseline earnings, note that this still mitigates the scope for income effects. However, this potentially decreases the potency of the blocked accounts as a way to reduce redistributive pressure, potentially dampening labor supply responses. Note that it would not have been operationally feasible to allow workers to select a new threshold in each paycycle.

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