Banorte bank-account panel and savings experiment (Mexico, restricted access)

Confidential single-counterparty data: not exercised here

This is confidential data from a single bank (Banorte). It is not for sale, not publicly downloadable, and not re-obtainable without the same institutional agreement: it carries no provenance badge because there is no access path we can run here. Researchers obtained it under a confidential agreement with the bank, and the field experiment was run jointly with it. The page documents what the data is and the gotchas; treat it as unverified. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

The Banorte data combines two things from one large Mexican bank: an individual-level account panel (checking balances, credit-card balances, limits and interest charges, deposits, payments, and transaction-level spending across ATM, card, and transfers, for millions of customers) and a randomized savings field experiment run with the bank. The experiment is what makes the panel valuable for causal work: treatment is assigned by the researchers, while the account panel measures outcomes at high frequency. A paper we distill uses it: Medina & Pagel use the Banorte account panel (161 pretreatment variables) and bimonthly credit bureau pulls (for non-Banorte balances) to study whether nudging saving causes households to borrow more.

• Cost: not for sale. Confidential single-counterparty data plus a joint field experiment.
• Source: Banorte (a Mexican bank); credit-bureau pulls obtained through the bank.
• Coverage: the bank’s own customers, not the Mexican population; high-frequency account and transaction records over the experiment window.

Access (restricted)

• No public download and no resale. The data is the bank’s confidential customer records; it cannot be purchased or redistributed.
• Through a confidential agreement with the bank. Access required a research agreement with Banorte; the field experiment was designed and run jointly with the bank. There is no standing way for a third party to reach the same data.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• One bank is not the population. The sample is Banorte customers, who are selected (banked, in this bank, eligible for the product); external validity to all Mexican households is a real limit. Do not generalize without argument.
• Outside-bank activity is only partly observed. Spending and balances at other institutions are seen only through the bimonthly credit-bureau pulls, which are coarser than the own-bank panel; cross-institution substitution is measured with error. Treat the credit-bureau view as lower resolution.
• The experiment defines the causal sample. Clean identification comes from the randomized treatment, not the full panel; observational comparisons in the panel are not the experiment. Keep the experimental and observational analyses separate.
• Account, not person, and not household. A customer can hold several products and a household several customers; aggregating requires care. Fix the unit before measuring saving or borrowing.
• Not redistributable. Results can be reported but the microdata cannot be shared, and the data cannot be re-pulled by others. Plan for non-reproducibility of the raw inputs.
• Currency and PPP. Balances are in pesos; cross-country reporting needs an explicit PPP conversion (the paper uses 2019 OECD PPP). State the conversion.

Citation

Cite the source and arrangement, e.g.: Banorte proprietary account panel and savings field experiment, confidential; used under agreement with the bank, YYYY-MM-DD. State the experiment window, the unit (account, customer, household), and any currency/PPP conversion.