constraints that prevent inexperienced customers from engaging with the formal banking system. Payroll accounts typically do not have minimum balance requirements, allow the employer to submit documentation on behalf of the employee, and can reduce social barriers to account use by making accounts mandatory and providing training and banking facilities near the workplace.<sup>12</sup> Payroll accounts are also typically portable and remain accessible to the employee even after the employment relationship has ended, and potentially provide a pathway to the use of other financial products. Because payroll accounts generate an inherent incentive to actively engage with a formal account, they are likely to have additional inclusion benefits, similar to those that have been shown in the case of direct deposit government payments and other financial products with a default component (see Muralidharan et al. 2016, Blumenstock et al. 2018, and Callen et al. 2019).

Traditionally, payroll accounts have used the conventional banking infrastructure, channeling paychecks into deposit accounts. However, in many developing economies, the limited reach of the physical banking infrastructure has hampered the expansion of payroll accounts. In recent years, mobile money technologies have been able to successfully address these challenges by establishing a decentralized network of mobile money agents.<sup>13</sup> In addition, financial service providers have used mobile money technologies to develop hybrid payroll account products that combine the advantages of bank and mobile money accounts.<sup>14</sup> In order to shed light on the comparative advantages of different types of payroll accounts, we use bank and mobile money accounts in our experiment.

Because consumers access mobile money accounts through commissions-motivated intermediaries (mobile money agents), their widespread adoption raises a number of consumer protection issues that go beyond those present in conventional banking (see Anagol et al. 2017). While access to a mobile money account reduces transaction costs, inexperienced customers often require assistance to use their account and do not use the technology in the most cost-effective way. Instead of transferring money from person-to-person using their own account, many inexperienced users require the help of an intermediary and make transfers using agent-to-agent transactions that incur additional fees on both ends of the transaction. Although the practice is officially not permitted by mobile money providers in our setting, it is extremely widespread. In our audit study, we find that agents overcharge consumers in 31% of all transactions. Similarly, inexperienced workers may be unable to use their account without an intermediary and may be prone to disclose passwords and other identifying information to mobile agents or peers to help them access their account, which raises additional consumer protection concerns. One question we ask in this study is

> 12In our population, most workers could not have opened accounts without the assistance of their employers. The firm, for example, provided employment records and identification data directly to the partner financial institutions. Formal account ownership at baseline was rare, and it was not possible to link wage payments to pre-existing accounts.

> 13Mobile money also offers additional features and functionality that traditional bank accounts lack, and that may make mobile money more useful for certain types of transactions such as remittances. In our experiment we use accounts that permit person-to-person transactions, the ability to cash in or out at any registered agent in the nationwide network, the ability to make direct payments, and airtime purchases from mobile providers.

> 14See Suri (2017) for an overview of the literature on mobile money.

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