Caprettini and Ciccone (2015) exploit a Brazilian tax reform to study the productivity losses caused by taxes on turnover, a type of tax that distorts transactions between firms and that is common in developing countries. They build a model in which many sectors exchange inputs sequentially before delivering final goods, and show that distortions to trade between firms are amplified by the number of stages of production". They calibrate the model to the Brazilian economy and compute the productivity gains of the reform. They find that considering production processes that have 11 or more stages of production leads to estimated productivity gains of removing the turnover tax more than 4 times larger than considering production processes where firms exchange inputs only once. When production requires an infinite number of stages the gains of the reform are maximized and they are equal to around 0.05% of national income.
Female-owned businesses continue to be smaller and less profitable than male-owned firms. We conduct an RCT in Ghana on a sample of 1,771 growth-oriented female entrepreneurs to investigate the effect of online networking groups on firm performance.
We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it?
This study examines the extent of market integration within the West African sub-region using the theory of “law of one price”. The dataset covers three countries: Nigeria, Benin and Togo accounting for about three quarters of the sub-region economy.
We document the trajectory of SMEs in Burkina Faso between 2020 and 2022, which were affected not only by the global Covid-19 shock, but also by several negative local shocks: two coups took place in 2022, in the context of increasing frequent terrorist attacks.
This project has two basic objectives. First, we analyse the stylised facts that characterise price setting behaviour in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
This project investigates whether a scalable technology that pools data generated by individual retailers can overcome informational barriers to growth.
