Strong export performance is often seen as key to unleashing firm productivity and spurring economic growth, both for the exporting firms themselves and for the broader economy. Given these perceived benefits, middle and low-income country (LMIC) governments commonly implement export promotion policies that aim to alleviate market failures hindering export growth.
Entrepreneurs in developing countries typically have small and stagnant businesses despite the ubiquity of business support programs aimed at spurring growth.
Tax audits are essential for governments to raise revenue but they can create economic distortions. To avoid the financial burden of an audit, firms may remain small, move to the informal sector, or shut down.
Several recent interventions study the importance of learning from others to increase microenterprise owner skills or knowledge. When do these RCT results provide information about the gains from scaling the same intervention? What moments should we use to infer scaled impact?
This project leverages a randomised control trial in a large-scale business support program in Ghana to explore whether the networks of entrepreneurs who own small firm, including peers and other stakeholders such as suppliers, can help predict entrepreneurs' marginal returns to the program and future business performance.
This project implements a field experiment to unpack demand- and supply-side constraints for quality upgrading in Ugandan carpentry, and study the interaction between these two sources of constraints.
Recent growth accelerations in Africa are characterized by declining shares of the labor force employed in agriculture, increasing labor productivity in agriculture, and declining labor productivity in modern sectors such as manufacturing.
We quantify the benefits of better firm-to-firm matching in an aggregate diffusion model where individuals reap profitable knowledge from others in the economy.
