This paper documents strong pressure on productive entrepreneurs in a developing country setting to share their income. This ‘kinship tax’ can distort productive decisions, including investment.
This paper was initially published in 2018 under the title 'The Impact of Monitoring Technologies on Contracts and Employee Behavior: Experimental Evidence from Kenya's Transit Industry'.
Can informal institutions facilitate enterprise growth through resolving business disputes in the contexts where formal mechanisms are near-complete failure?
As a result of this project the Ghanaian 2014 Integrated Business Establishment Survey (IBES) firm census microdata has been made publicly available through DataFirst, a microdata repository at the University of Cape Town.
Despite the popularity of business training among policy-makers, its use has faced increasing scepticism. Most of the first randomized experiments could not detect statistically significant impacts of training on firm profits or sales.
This paper documents the evolution of markups and concentration, detects causality between firm churning and markups/concentration, and determines the impact of fixed costs on markups.
This paper examines whether globalization promotes female empowerment by improving the job opportunities available to women. Previous work has documented that exporting causally improved working conditiosn at predominationly female garment factories in Myanmar.
Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests.