Fragile and conflict-affected states

This project assesses the impact of management practices on private hopsital efficiency and performance across Nepal.  

Through a field experiment on micro food retailers in Cairo, the research team investigates the importance of innovation in marketing practices for scaling and improving businesses.

As many developing countries see dozens of nearly identical micro-entrepreneurs and products concentrated in the same areas, this project tests for the existence of social institutions that pressure business owners to share total demand and evidence of collusive price-setting behaviour, using a simulated market competition with actual micro-entrepreneurs.

This project estimates the effect of limited observability of worker ability and employer statistical discrimination on the efficiency with which jobs are allocated, firm productivity, and the career effects of obtaining a job.

This study uses data on modern-day Eastern Congo to explore whether returns to taxation of resources can explain the establishment of protection, taxation, and dispute resolution institutions.

This project aims to address how gains are appropriated in a trading relationship by estimating the parameters of firms’ cost functions and uncovering their profit-sharing rules. 

The research team built a unique data set on Afghani households to study the causal relationship between conflict and private enterprise, in particular entrepreneurship, in conflict-affected areas.

In post-conflict settings, credit constraints and risk are often prevalent and binding. This project uses an experiment to estimate the competing effects of credit constraints and risk of retail firms at the end of commodity supply chains in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The research identifies which Haitian institutions contribute to underdevelopment by limiting access to international trade, and aims to study how these restrictions affect the distribution of gains from trade throughout Haitian society.

The research team constructs a database on cartels in developing countries to carry out a quantitative assessment of the economic effects of cartels on growth, which will inform regulators on the potential for competition law enforcement to contribute to economic development.