Psychosocial and Full arms increased beneficiaries’ annual business revenues by USD$155.50 (or, 62.26%) and USD$267.85 (or 107.39%), respectively. Moreover, food security rose by 0.47 SD in the Psychosocial arm and 0.63 SD in the Full arm. While many of these positive effects were similar in size to the Capital arm that included economic components alone, the program was most cost-effective when it included the psychosocial interventions. The benefit-to-cost ratio of the Psychosocial arm was 2.98, and the Full arm 2.08, which were both significantly greater than that of the Capital arm, being 1.25,<sup>8</sup> where one represents the break-even point when benefits on household consumption are the same as program costs.

Here, we explicate the theoretical basis of those psychosocial interventions and further explore the psychosocial mechanisms through which they fueled economic development. In the follow-up surveys, we measured approximately 100 psychosocial items within 13 indices. In this section, we present additional analyses on these psychosocial outcomes to add converging correlational evidence on which are the likeliest psychosocial processes through which those interventions may have operated, of those measured. Building on these analyses, in the following section, we present results of a mechanism experiment to identify causal effects of specific psychosocial factors.

Given the importance and strength of relationships in shaping women’s behavior and outcomes in this low-income, interdependent cultural context (see Fig. 1) and building on our prior laboratory studies (Thomas et al., 2020), we hypothesized that enhancing intrapersonal beliefs alone (e.g., self-beliefs) may be limited in influencing women’s ultimate economic outcomes unless women’s relational affordances (e.g., social capital, social influence) were also strengthened.

For this analysis, we first compute the standardized main treatment effects at <mark>follow-up</mark> across all psychosocial outcomes of the Psychosocial arm compared to the Control arm (Table 1, column 3), as well as the marginal effects, i.e., added value, of the psychosocial interventions by taking the difference between the Full and Capital arms (Table 1, column 4).<sup>9</sup> We rank-order the main treatment effects to highlight those with the highest effect size estimates. Second, we assess the extent to which the psychosocial variables positively predict, or correlate with, women’s offfarm business revenues, using data from the control group at <mark>follow-up</mark> (Table 1, column 5). We focus on women’s business outcomes because they were a primary target of the program and a proximal step on the path to reduce poverty. We present bivariate correlations for comparability across outcomes and interpretability in terms of effect size. Finally, given different limitations of these analysis approaches, we group psychosocial variables according to a triangulation exercise: we consider the outcomes with the greatest likelihood of being mechanisms to be those that show the strongest and most points of supportive evidence across these three analyses (i.e., columns 3- 5 of Table 1).

# **_Results_**

> 8 These estimates assume 50% annual dissipation of impact and 5% discount rate. They are conservative given that the benefits only include effects on consumption and not on other indicators of wealth (e.g., assets).

> 9 We present both main and marginal effects because they have different interpretations. The comparison of the Psychosocial arm versus the Control arm represents the causal effects of the psychosocial interventions _plus_ the core economic component. The difference between the Full arm effect minus the Capital arm effect represents the marginal effect of the psychosocial interventions net of potential complementarities with the core economic components. Of note, the cash grant may have also affected psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Orkin et al., 2023) in ways that may have limited the scope for additional effects from the psychosocial interventions in the Full arm. Given these different interpretations, we triangulate across both types of comparisons.

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