Efforts to bring informal firms into the formal sector are often based on a view that this will bring benefits to the firms themselves, or at least benefit governments through increasing the tax base.
In this paper, published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Alvarez, Benguria, Engbom and Moser (2018) document a large decline in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012.
This paper by Atkin, Chaudhry, Chaudry, Khandelwal, and Verhoogen (2017), published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan.
Atkin, Khandelwal and Osman (2017) conduct in this paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a randomized experiment that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt.
Using household-level data from Mexico we document patterns among schooling, entrepreneurial decisions and household characteristics such as assets, talent of household members and age of the household head.
Sialkot, Pakistan, is the world center of hand-stitched soccer-ball manufacturing. The existence of the cluster is puzzling and seems to argue against the "home market effect", since there is little local demand for soccer balls.
Kapteyn and Wah (2016) conducted a field survey of owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Yangon, Myanmar to investigate obstacles to business development in the region. The analysis focuses on access to credit, public services, and electricity.
