Zambia

Female Entrepreneurship and Trust in the Market

Commerce requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group can expropriate another using violence or social power.

Working Paper
25 Mar 2025

The Role of (Mis)Perceptions in Product Choice: Evidence from a Randomised Trial in Zambia

We study whether small retailers are deterred from stocking products by misperceptions about their profitability.

Research Note
24 Mar 2025

Raising Retail Productivity through Data Pooling: A Mobile Phone App Intervention

The rise of the information economy has highlighted how data may be an input into production (Veldkamp and Chung, forthcoming). Since firms conversely accumulate data through production, large firms may be able to accumulate data more quickly, giving them an advantage. The advantage is especially stark in retail, where a key dimension of productivity is the ability to forecast demand for individual products (Samaniego de la Parra and Shenoy, 2023). Walmart came to dominate U.S.

Research Project
3 Dec 2024

Does weak contract enforcement hurt female entrepreneurship and inter-gender business linkages?

This project is a series of low-cost lab-in-the-field interventions that aim to identify the causal effects of institutions on business performance and gender gaps, and explore the channels behind this effect in Lusaka, Zambia.

Research Project
28 Oct 2024

Exports, Imports and Exchange Rate in LICs: Firm Level Evidence From Zambia

This paper adds to the literature on exchange rate and international trade by reexamining the effect of sustained currency fluctuation on the flow of exports and imports. We estimate the effect of strong exchange rate movement on trade by exploiting a regression discontinuity design.

Working Paper
11 Sep 2024

Friendship & Collusion Among Lusakan Fruit and Vegetable Sellers

Markets in developing countries are often portrayed as dysfunctional, with low levels of competition and large numbers of unproductive firms. In theory, increased competition could work as a disciplining force in these settings.

Research Note
17 Jun 2024

Kinship Pressure and Firm-Worker Matching Distortions

Many small businesses in low-income countries hire employees from their kinship networks. This fact is often attributed to hiring from the kinship network reducing contracting frictions or informational asymmetries.

Research Note
18 Oct 2023

Friendship and Collusion Among Lusakan Fruit and Vegetable Sellers

This study examines the role that non-monetary aspects (such as friendships) can play in sustaining collusive behaviour.

Research Project
1 Aug 2023

Raising Retail Productivity through Data Pooling: Preparatory and Pilot Work to Design a Mobile App Intervention in Zambia

This project investigates whether a scalable technology that pools data generated by individual retailers can overcome informational barriers to growth.

Research Project
1 Apr 2023

Kinship Pressure and Employee Selection

This project will evaluate whether kinship pressure and mutual insurance arrangements contribute to the hiring of family members in microenterprises in Zambia.

Research Project
1 Jan 2021

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