Upgrading Financial Markets -- by Francis Annan, Seth Garz

Field and partnership support from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)-Sierra Leone, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), Orange Money, and GT Bank is acknowledged. Thanks to Lucas Li, Ei Thandar Myint, Chiman Cheung and Kenshi Kawade for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to ReFinD Research Initiative for funding. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals for research data collection were obtained from IPA (#16387), the Government of Sierra Leone (#009/11/2023) and UC Berkeley (#2024-06-17541). The project and outcome variables were pre-registered in the AEA RCT Registry, ID-0011825. For helpful comments, we thank Paul Niehaus, Cátia Batista, Pedro C. Vicente, Xavier Gine, Peter Quartey, Travis Lybbert, Dean Karlan, NCLUSION.com, and several other colleagues. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry