Branchless Banking: Evaluating the Doorstep Delivery of Financial Services in Rural India

This paper evaluates the effect on household savings of India’s recent financial inclusion drive, a drive that generated an unprecedented increase in access to financial institutions by using mobile technologies to deliver services practically at the doorstep of rural households. Using household data from just before and after the initiation of the policy, matched with village-level data on financial institutions, I identify the effects of access to financial institutions utilizing longitudinal variation in conjunction with geographic eligibility criterion that provided services to villages based on the size distribution of villages in the service area assigned to the bank.