Kenya

Resilience to Economic Shocks through Continued Electricity Access in Kenya

This project employs a field experiment to study how access to affordable electricity can improve the economic resilience of workers and firms to the coronavirus crisis.

Research Project
30 Jun 2020

Enterprise Responses to Redistribution in Kenya

This project studies a randomized, large-scale unconditional cash transfer program in Kenya, and find a meaningful increase in revenues for enterprises in areas experiencing a greater volume of cash transfers.

Research Note
27 Feb 2020

Market-level Effects of Competition: Prices, Quality and Mechanisms

This project will analyse how increased competition affects prices, quality, and firm entry and exit at the market level through a randomised rollout of new stores by an NGO with a reputation for high quality.

Research Project
1 Jan 2020

Realizing the potential of digital development: The case of agricultural advice

Mobile phones are almost universally available, and the costs of information transmission are low. They are used by smallholder farmers in low-income countries, largely successfully, to optimize markets for their produce. Fabregas et al.

Journal Article
13 Dec 2019

Taming Counterfeit Markets with Consumer Information

This project uses an RCT to study two interventions that may address market frictions caused by information asymmetry in the context of markets for maize and bean seeds.

Research Project
1 Nov 2019

Crony Capitalism, Collective Action, and ICT: Evidence from Kenyan Contract Farming

The shift from subsistence to commercial economies creates surplus, but often induces conflict over it. Under extractive institutions and weak contract enforcement, crony capitalism may emerge and limit the benefits of modernization.

Working Paper
15 Oct 2019

Harnessing ICT to Increase Agricultural Production: Evidence From Kenya

Sending SMS messages with agricultural advice to smallholder farmers increased yields by 11.5% relative to a control group with no messages. These effects are concentrated among farmers who had no agronomy training and had little interaction with sugar cane company staff at baseline.

Working Paper
23 Sep 2019

Long-Run Enterprise Responses to Redistribution: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

Cash transfer programs continue to be implemented and expanded by governments and non-government organizations in many low-income countries as a tool for poverty alleviation. When implemented at scale, such programs may have important short- and long-run implications for firms. However, there are relatively few opportunities to study how an economy responds to an exogenous shock of such a magnitude, and the response of the private sector is critical in determining how these types of shocks will propagate through the economy.

Research Project
18 Sep 2019

Exporting to Fragile States in Africa: Firm‐level Evidence

Chacha and Edwards (2019) analyses the effect of fragility in destination markets on firm export behavior and the role of firm size in mediating adverse outcomes.

Journal Article
1 Aug 2019

Developing a “Product-Market Experimentation & Fit” Measurement Tool and Testing its Effectiveness via an RCT with Lean Start-up Entrepreneurs in Kenya and Uganda

This project aims to improve our understanding of ‘demand-side factors’ related to why some small firms succeed and scale-up, while others do not.

Research Project
1 Aug 2019

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