Climate, environment and social compliance

By exploiting the rapid opening of Myanmar's market, the author examines the impact of the introduction to trade and FDI on productivity, management, and working conditions. 

This study quantifies the impact of temperature, humidity, and pollution on worker productivity while also estimating the co-benefits of introducing environmentally friendly technology such as LED lighting to worker productivity and firm profitability.

As some environmental production processes can improve a firm's efficiency, this study examines the impact of training a sample of Bangladeshi firms in green production methods on both ecological benefits and economic profitability.

The researchers study the impact of corruption on incentives to innovate and private enterprise growth in an environment where bribery wins government contracts, leading to an inefficient market outcome.

By hiring traders to make credible output bids to treatment and control firms, the researchers are able to collect accurate price data that allows them to test whether newly more energy-efficient firms reduce output prices.

By implementing two pilot studies on the use of communications technologies in a large agribusiness company in Kenya, the researchers examined the impact of innovations in management information systems on firm performance.

Firms in developing countries exhibit large variations in revenue and output, (given the level of their inputs). A number of researchers have suggested that this is due to “capital misallocation”, i.e. capital does not flow to the households, firms, and entrepreneurs who can use it most productively. There are, however, other plausible explanations of the variability of input-adjusted revenue. One is that firms with greater market power (perhaps because they are more innovative) may charge higher prices and thus generate greater revenues from identical production functions.

This detailed study of the Indian brick industry allows for reliable estimates of firm productivity, disentangling competing explanations of variations in revenue and output across firms such as capital misallocation, market power, and adjustment costs.

Using one treatment to reduce the costs of registration for firms and one to emphasize the legal costs of informality, this project seeks to identify specific policy interventions designed to induce the formalization of firms.

This project seeks to understand the recent impact on Ethiopia's leather value chain of investment and growing interest from predominantly Asian/Chinese firms in order to inform policies to foster productivity-enhancing linkages between foreign and local firms.