intervention, which we will refer to as baseline toilet ownership.<sup>20</sup> For households who reported having a toilet, survey enumerators verified it directly and made observations on its appearance, overground quality, and cleanliness.

## **3.2.2 Administrative Data**

In addition to the primary endline survey of clients and their households, we rely on two sources of administrative data in our analysis. The first is detailed loan data from our lending partner on all clients residing in the study areas. In particular, we have available information on all loans taken from the partner MFI by any client residing in our study GPs during the study period, including amount borrowed, repayment amount, the date of disbursement, tenure, purpose of the loan and default. This provides us with reliable information on the disbursement of sanitation loans and other loans, and allows us to track trends for loan uptake over time.

The second source of administrative data is credit bureau data from a leading provider, used by the MFI partner when making decisions on loan applications. Following new regulations introduced by the Reserve Bank of India in 2011, all micro-finance institutions are required to report on all loans outstanding for each client on a monthly basis. We obtained this information for around 88 percent of clients in our sample.<sup>21</sup> Reassuringly, impact results are consistent for the sample for whom we have credit bureau information, as shown in TableOA-B.1 in the Online Appendix.<sup>22</sup> As a result, these data allow us to construct a more accurate measure of household borrowing from micro-finance institutions that is free from recall and measurement error.

# **3.3 Sample Descriptives and Sample Balance**

Table 2 presents summary statistics for the main characteristics of clients and their households. These variables have been constructed from survey data collected at endline. We thus concentrate on variables that are unlikely to have been affected by the intervention itself. For each variable we present, in Column 1 of Table 2, the mean for the control group when the experiment started. The table also tests for systematic differences in these characteristics between the control and treatment groups, with the difference in means between the control and treatment group, and the p-value for a t-test of equality of these means presented in Columns 2 and 3, respectively. As the allocation of the sanitation loan program was random across GPs, we expect no systematic differences between the two groups at the time of the intervention roll-out.<sup>23</sup>

> 20This retrospective measure of toilet ownership matches well with baseline data available for a sub-sample of households. Specifically, the two measures are identical in 78% of cases, with a mismatch in 22% of cases, which could be due to misreporting, or from recall error.

> 21It was not possible to obtain data for the remaining 12 percent of clients, since our partner MFI no longer had all the information required by the credit bureau in order to avail of these records.

> 22We do detect some differences in the characteristics of clients for whom we obtained credit bureau data, relative to the full sample of clients. Specifically, those for whom we obtained credit bureau data are more likely to be married, and less likely to live in female-headed households. Household heads also tend to have more years of education. This is shown

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