Kenya

Small business training to improve management practices in developing countries: re-assessing the evidence for ‘training doesn’t work’

Despite the popularity of business training among policy-makers, its use has faced increasing scepticism. Most of the first randomized experiments could not detect statistically significant impacts of training on firm profits or sales.

Journal Article
29 Jun 2021

Falling living standards during the COVID-19 crisis: Quantitative evidence from nine developing countries

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments wit

Journal Article
5 Feb 2021

Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs: A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya

A common concern with efforts to directly help some small businesses to grow is that their growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors.

Journal Article
1 Jan 2021

Distinguishing Constraints on Financial Inclusion and Their Impact on GDP, TFP, and Inequality

A general equilibrium model featuring multiple realistic sources of financial frictions is developed to study how different constraints interact in equilibrium.

Journal Article
1 Jan 2021

Competition and Entry in Agricultural Markets: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

African agricultural markets are characterized by low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices. Many have worried that this wedge is partially driven by imperfect competition among intermediaries.

Journal Article
1 Dec 2020

Monitoring in Target Contracts: Theory and Experiment in Kenyan Public Transit

Kelley, Lane and Schönholzer (2020) develop a relational contracting model to study the role of monitoring in firms and evaluate the model experimentally in the field.

Working Paper
23 Oct 2020

Exerting Market Power: Competition Among Agricultural Traders in Kenya

This research note describes experimental evidence from Kenya on intermediary market structure. We find that traders act consistently with joint profit maximization.

Research Note
1 Jul 2020

COVID-19-Induced Cash Flow Constraints and the Burden of Taxation: A Study with the Kenya Revenue Authority

This project will study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on formal economic activity and tax collection in Kenya, evaluate the impact of changes to tax policy in reaction to it and explore low-cost interventions that could encourage tax compliance.

Research Project
30 Jun 2020

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