The dynamics of SMEs: informality and entrepreneurship

This study conducts a two-stage randomized controlled trial involving a government-sponsored apprenticeship training program to examine the impacts of apprenticeship labour inputs on different firm outcomes. 

The research team conducts an impact evaluation of the entreprenant status on formalization in Benin by conducting a randomized controlled trial offering different packages of incentives to informal businesses. 

By creating a theoretical model along with a unique, novel data set, this project sheds light on the relationship between credit and investor partnerships and the resulting level of entrepreneurship.  

This project aims to harmonize and make public two innovation surveys of Nigeria from 2007 and 2011 in order to fill a gap in existing African data, and to create a comprehensive picture and research tool for Nigerian industry. 

By studying the football and surgical goods industries of Pakistan, this project seeks to identify barriers to upgrading in manufacturing firms such as high costs of high-quality inputs and fixed costs of innovation. 

This study builds on an earlier ERG project to carefully examine the causal mechanisms by which business skills training affects business outcomes using high frequency follow-up surveys.

This project draws on ongoing data collection methods to understand small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Low-Income Countries (LICs) and their financial activities, in order to create models for policy recommendations designed to address market frictions.

This randomized evaluation studies the effects of incentivising microfinance loan officers to identify clients with the highest potential returns on their loans, in order to test the hypothesis that the business model of classic microfinance institutions might be one of the reasons why high-growth microentrepreneurs have difficulty accessing SME-level loans. 

This research team is carrying out a large-scale randomized trial that offers small informal firms different business registration services as well as information sessions on the benefits of separating business from household finances in Malawi to estimate the causal impact of enterprise formalization on business performance.

Building on an existing large-scale randomized controlled trial involving Ugandan SMEs, this project measures the spillover effects of several business expansion interventions on the business practices of firms that belong to the ‘treated’ firms’ social, business and market networks.