Unlocking data for understanding markets and firms

In this project, Schreiber sets up suggestion boxes for 1,600 workers in a Bangladeshi garment factory and tests the efficacy of two cross-randomized voice-enhancing managerial interventions through an RCT.

This project will study whether customs officers affect firms’ bribery costs and trade costs, and how these officers' time horizons and professional relationships operate as mechanisms.

This project identifies the role of information frictions in the relationships between firms and government bodies.

This project examines whether political and personal connections, as well as co-ethnicity, co-religiosity and gender, affect access to institutions.

This project examines demand-side constraints to the growth of firms in Uganda including search and contracting frictions related to asymmetric information on quality.

In South Asia, three quarters of ultra-poor households report casual labour as the dominant form of income. In urban areas, short-term construction jobs are found through social connections or by going to a “labour stand”, essentially an intersection where low-skilled labourers wait each morning for employers looking to hire for a day or two.

Growth-promoting structural change explains much of Africa's recent growth boom, especially in Ethiopia, Malawi, Senegal and Tanzania. In these countries, however, structural change has not been accompanied by labor productivity growth in the nonagricultural sectors. In fact, the expansion of services and manufacturing has typically been accompanied by low or negative productivity growth in these same sectors.

This project explores the theory that the lack of price competition between vendors, and the subsequent oversupply of vendors, is caused by collusion and under-experimentation.

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.

This project examines workers and team leaders working in garment factories in Pakistan to understand what characteristics are correlated with productivity and whether the search for and composition of teams is efficient.