Policy

This project will assess, through a randomised control trial, whether providing information about AfCFTA affects firms’ decisions to expand their international operations.

This project will explore the impacts of compulsory energy audits on firms in Vietnam.

This project will examine the trade-offs between environmental policy goals (chiefly pollution reduction in high population density areas) and firm outcomes related to agglomeration.

This project will build a unique panel dataset of the universe of formal Senegalese firms from 2007 to 2020 before evaluating the impact of the recent increase in the national minimum wage.

This project exploits an arguably exogenous shock to the allocation of coal mines in India to study the spillovers of misallocation in an upstream sector through the rest of the economy.

This project will study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on formal economic activity and tax collection in Kenya, evaluate the impact of changes to tax policy in reaction to it and explore low-cost interventions that could encourage tax compliance.

Growth-promoting structural change explains much of Africa's recent growth boom, especially in Ethiopia, Malawi, Senegal and Tanzania. In these countries, however, structural change has not been accompanied by labor productivity growth in the nonagricultural sectors. In fact, the expansion of services and manufacturing has typically been accompanied by low or negative productivity growth in these same sectors.

Cash transfer programs continue to be implemented and expanded by governments and non-government organizations in many low-income countries as a tool for poverty alleviation. When implemented at scale, such programs may have important short- and long-run implications for firms. However, there are relatively few opportunities to study how an economy responds to an exogenous shock of such a magnitude, and the response of the private sector is critical in determining how these types of shocks will propagate through the economy.