In this paper Alé Chilet and Itin-Shwartz (2020) study the effectiveness of marketing channel liberalization in increasing competition among traders and prices obtained by farmers for their produce.
African agricultural markets are characterized by low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices. Many have worried that this wedge is partially driven by imperfect competition among intermediaries.
Bargaining over purchase prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, Hardy et al. (2020) show that poorer sellers agree to significantly lower prices than wealthier peers.
A burgeoning literature in economics uses firm census data to provide explanations for the very large differences in income per capita across countries.
Alfonsi, Bandiera, Bassi, Burgess, Rasul, Sulaiman and Vitali (2020) design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries.
Kelley, Lane and Schönholzer (2020) develop a relational contracting model to study the role of monitoring in firms and evaluate the model experimentally in the field.