As a result of this project the Ghanaian 2014 Integrated Business Establishment Survey (IBES) firm census microdata has been made publicly available through DataFirst, a microdata repository at the University of Cape Town.
Hardy and McCasland (2021) report on an experiment that brings insights from the literature on demand-side determinants of technology adoption to the study of peer-to-peer diffusion.
A burgeoning literature in economics uses firm census data to provide explanations for the very large differences in income per capita across countries.
Bargaining over purchase prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, Hardy et al. (2020) show that poorer sellers agree to significantly lower prices than wealthier peers.
This project will conduct a field experiment in Ghana to investigate the effect of an exogenous expansion of female professional networks on firm performance and well-being of female entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs in developing countries report that unreliable electricity imposes a serious constraint, yet little evidence exists on how blackouts impact the micro-firms that account for the majority of employment.
Multiple field experiments report positive financial returns to capital shocks for male and not female microentrepreneurs. But these analyses overlook the fact that female entrepreneurs often reside with male entrepreneurs.
