from a similar background, instead of coming from an unrelated population or an anonymous source like a standardized business training course. Indeed, Appadurai (2004) and Ray (2006) argue that aspirations are influenced by social comparisons with the achievements of others who are similar in spatial and socio-economic backgrounds. Similarly, Dalton et al. (2016) and Genicot and Ray (2017) show how aspirations can determine individual investment in future betterment. Moreover, recent empirical evidence confirms that aspirations and outcomes can be raised by exposing individuals to successful experiences of similar others (see e.g. (Bernard et al., 2014)) or potential role models (see e.g. (Beaman et al., 2012), (Riley, 2017)), and that the increase in aspirations is associated with an increase in behaviors leading to a better future. In our setting, learning about what successful shop owners from a similar background do could have increased business aspirations within our sample, and through this channel improved business performance.

To assess whether this channel is valid in our study, we directly measure business aspirations at baseline, midline, and endline for all shop owners in the sample. We elicit aspirations on various business dimensions, specifically we ask: “Please imagine your business a year from now. How large do you imagine your business premises to be? How many people will work there? How many customers will come by on a normal day? What are the daily sales you aspire to have?” On each dimension, responses were primed by reminding respondents of their current levels. Respondents answered with estimates in square meters, numbers of employees and customers, and amounts of daily sales in Indonesian Rupiah.

Appendix Table A6 shows treatment effects on these various dimensions of business aspirations. We find that shop owners in any of the treated groups do not increase their aspirations on any business dimension. These results rule out the possibility that the treatment effects we observe on sales and profits are driven by an increase in businesses aspirations.

# **C Real Adoption of Practices or Self-Reporting Bias?**

One possible additional concern is related to social desirability bias or experimenter demand effects. Specifically, the concern relates to treated shop owners simply misreporting higher adoption rates. First, if the results were influenced by experimenter demand effects, we would observe significant effects for the handbook treatment as well, which we do not. Second, such misreporting would affect all business practices and not just the ones included in the handbook. As a direct test, we run placebo regressions to assess treatment effects on practices that were not mentioned in the handbook. Appendix Table A7 confirms that the treatments did not have any significant impact on these placebo practices, which supports the argument that the impacts on business practice adoption are legitimate effects.

We also use data on “objective” measures gathered by the survey team. At the end of the baseline and endline surveys, enumerators were instructed to report their own views on shop appearance. For instance, they were asked to record whether the shop appeared clean, well-stocked, and whether prices were clearly marked. While these measures do not directly indicate or confirm the use of specific business practices, they do provide a rough indication of whether the shop is better “organized”. As Appendix Table A8 shows, we do see improvements on some of these measures in shop owners assigned to _Documentary_ and _Assistance_ . Even though shop owners assigned to _All Three_ do not show significant changes in these measures, the sign of the coefficients go in the right direction.

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