business growth after having implemented some of the best practices included in the handbook. This treatment (hereafter _Documentary_ ) targets the psychological and emotional influences that are triggered through observing the successful experience of similar others (see La Ferrara, 2016, for a review). A second sub-set of handbook recipients is offered light implementation assistance in the form of two 30-minute shop visits by trained facilitators (hereafter _Assistance_ ). These helpers provide one-on-one implementation guidance and troubleshooting for the business practices highlighted in the handbook, hence facilitating learning through own experience (Kolb, 1984). Finally, to account for complementarities we offer a third sub-set of handbook recipients both _Documentary_ and _Assistance_ (hereafter _All Three_ ). Overall, this study design allows us to test simple channels of disseminating relevant local business information, as well as test the subsequent impacts of adopting these business practices on performance outcomes.

The analysis presented in this paper is based on pooled estimates from two follow-up surveys, six and eighteen months after the intervention. While attrition in either survey is low (less than 20% in second endline) and uncorrelated with treatment status, the take-up rates especially for the _Documentary_ and _All Three_ groups are also low at 52% and 47%, respectively. Therefore, we present both intent-to-treat as well as treatment-on-treated results in the analysis. First, we find underwhelming evidence for the effectiveness of the _Handbook_ alone, with this pure information shock resulting in no significant improvements in the adoption of business practices. By contrast, we find strong and statistically significant impacts when pure information is complemented with experiential learning. After correcting for multiple-hypothesis testing, we find that adding either emotional learning, simple hands-on assistance, or both results in up to a 6.5 percentage point improvement in relevant record-keeping practices covered in the handbook – a 33% improvement over the control group. In fact, these coefficients reflect statistically significant improvements over providing the _Handbook_ alone. For the _All Three_ group, we further find statistically significant improvements in the adoption of relevant practices related to planning (6.8 percentage points), stocking up (5.3 percentage points), marketing (6.1 percentage points), and joint decision-making (5.9 percentage points).

On business performance, we find these practice effects translate to improvements in profits and sales. Moreover, we find significant and economically meaningful impacts for firms assigned to _Assistance_ and _All Three_ , with intent-to-treat analysis showing an increase in profits of 35% (0.28 standard deviation improvement) and 21% (0.17 standard deviation improvement), respectively. Given the uneven and low take-up rates, the increase in profits for businesses who adopted either treatment (i.e. the treatment-on-treated) shows larger effects, with an increase of 42.7% (0.34 standard deviation improvement) and 41.5% (0.33 standard deviation improvement), respectively. Likewise, the analysis finds statistically significant improvements in sales, representing a 16.7% (ITT) and 20.6% (ToT) improvement for _Assistance_ ; and a 16.2% (ITT) and 31.2% (ToT) increase for _All Three_ . Businesses assigned to _Documentary_ also increase their profits and sales with respect to _Control_ , but the effects are not statistically significant, most likely due to low take-up.<sup>2</sup> Following the null effects on practices, we find no significant effects on sales and profits of offering the _Handbook_ alone. In fact, the F-tests of differences in coefficients show that the three experiential learning groups significantly outperform the _Handbook_ group on both profits and sales.

> 2The treatment-on-treated coefficients do scale up, but standard errors also increase so the p-values remain insignificant

2