On December 12-13, PEDL hosted a conference on ‘firms and development’ jointly with the IPA SME Initiative. Many ERG and MRG grantees attended and presented their projects - whether they have reached completion and produced papers or their studies are in the early stages. The conference took place at the British Academy in London. The programme and list of participants for this event can be found on the conference website, and you can find video and audio interviews of PEDL-funded researchers from the event below.
Prior to this workshop, PEDL hosted a four-day workshop with researchers from LICs at the University of Warwick. During the first two and a half days, extensive feedback was provided on participants’ research proposals, and the grant holders presented their respective projects to the group several times. On the third day, the LIC-based grant holders were joined by PEDL grantees who are currently PhD students. The workshop then took a conference format, with presentations both from the PhD student grantees and the LIC-based grantees.
Video interviews of PEDL researchers
Tarek Ghani (Berkeley Haas School of Business) discusses findings and policy implications from his study (joint with Michael Callen, UCSD, and Joshua Blumenstock, University of Washington) on mobile salary payments in Afghanistan. For more on this project, see the research team's policy paper and PEDL Research Note.
Rohini Pande (Harvard University) discusses findings from her earlier studies (joint with Erica Field, Duke University and Natalia Rigol, MIT) on the role of microfinance contract design in helping micro-entrepreneurs invest in their businesses. She also outlines the objectives of her current PEDL-funded project, which builds on this existing research to study the long-term impacts of a repayment flexibility intervention on the growth dynamics of microfinance clients’ enterprises. Rohini presented early results from this study at the conference. For more information on this project, please visit its profile page.
Lawrence Edwards (University of Cape Town) describes findings from his PEDL study (joint with Mamello Nchake, also at UCT) on price integration in Lesotho and South Africa. Lawrence presented the project at the London event. For more on this project, see the research team's two recently released working papers here and here.
Arti Grover (World Bank) discusses the impact of the new GQ highway in India on the entry patterns of new manufacturing plants and the relocation of existing plants from both remote areas and metropolitan areas to locations closer to the highway. Arti also presented these results at the conference. For more detail on the findings from this study, see the team’s two working papers here and here, or their PEDL Research Note.
Francis Teal (University of Oxford) stresses the need to gather up-to-date firm-level data in order to better understand the dynamics of employment and firm growth across different sectors in African countries. The interview includes a description of his PEDL project’s preliminary findings, which Francis also presented at the event. For more information on this study, please visit the project’s profile page.
Audio interviews of PEDL researchers
Rebecca Namatovu (Makerere Business School) discusses the policy implications from her study on informal cross-border trade by poor Ugandan women, and the potential impact of training and sensitising these women about the East African Community (EAC) integration process and the benefits of compliance with its regulations and policies, in this audio interview.
More on this project can be found on its profile page.
Lorenzo Casaburi (Stanford University) describes early findings from his PEDL-funded research (joint with Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, both Harvard University) on the impact of mobile phones on the way a large Kenyan agribusiness firm’s manages the provision of inputs to its sugarcane suppliers in this audio interview.
More on this project can be found on its profile page.
