Sending SMS messages with agricultural advice to smallholder farmers increased yields by 11.5% relative to a control group with no messages. These effects are concentrated among farmers who had no agronomy training and had little interaction with sugar cane company staff at baseline.
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.
Colonnelli and Prem (2019) estimate the causal real economic effects of a randomized anticorruption crackdown on local governments in Brazil over the period 2003-2014.
It has long been argued that firms in developing countries enter small and struggle to grow large. This paper studies whether the small firm scale might itself hinder their labor productivity, thus spurring a vicious cycle of underdevelopment. Bassi et al.
In this paper, Kamutando (2019) examines the link between financial constraints, misallocation and firm growth in the informal manufacturing sector in Zimbabwe.
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members.
When contracting institutions are weak or exploitable, firms in developing countries rely on a mixture of social and formal heuristics to select business partners.
What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, Abebe, Fafchamps, Koelle and Quinn (2019) place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers.
The assignment of workers to tasks is an important feature of the organization of production within firms. Adhvaryu, Kala and Nyshadham (2017) study how task allocation across workers changes in response to productivity shocks.
