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.
Blattman et al. (2019) study two interventions for underemployed youth across five Ethiopian sites: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job offer to an industrial firm.
This working paper, by Alfaro-Ureña, Manelici and Vasquez (2019), investigates the effects of becoming a supplier to multinational corporations (MNCs) using administrative data tracking all firm-to-firm transactions in Costa Rica.
Economic growth requires confidence in the state's ability to enforce secure exchange. But when states selectively enforce rule of law, political considerations can moderate the trust that buyers have in sellers.
A widely-held view is that small firms in developing countries are prevented from making profitable investments by lack of access to credit and insurance markets. One solution is to provide repayment flexibility in credit contracts.
Despite the importance of agglomeration externalities in theoretical work, evidence for their nature, scale, and scope remains elusive, particularly in developing countries.
