Exploratory Research Grant Projects

Using one treatment to reduce the costs of registration for firms and one to emphasize the legal costs of informality, this project seeks to identify specific policy interventions designed to induce the formalization of firms.

This project begins the initial work into creating a feasible pilot internship program for young Ethiopians, in order to study the impact of training in entrepreneurial skills and improved business networks on the emergence and growth of new firms in developing countries. 

The research team considers the ability of mobile salary payments in Afghanistan to mitigate constraints on workers and businesses such as weak security, reliability, and efficiency by examining the deployment of a service that allows Afghan firms to pay salaries directly to employees' mobile phones.

This research examines the dynamics of how managerial capital might help entrepreneurs in low-income countries to transform their businesses from micro- to small-sized enterprises and from small- to medium-sized enterprises.