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 project will construct a database of the energy use of manufacturing enterprises in Dhaka to identify firm growth and economic outcomes over time and space.
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.
Can informal institutions facilitate enterprise growth through resolving business disputes in the contexts where formal mechanisms are near-complete failure?
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'.
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.