Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

This projects studies how firms are affected when transportation infrastructure provides them with access to new markets and when outside firms gain access to their local markets.

This project will study the effects of actual and threatened skills audits on applicants’ skill reporting decisions, applicants’ skill investment decisions, firms’ hiring decisions, and firm-applicant match quality.

This project identifies the role of information frictions in the relationships between firms and government bodies.

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.

This project explores the theory that the lack of price competition between vendors, and the subsequent oversupply of vendors, is caused by collusion and under-experimentation.

This project investigates the role of access to comparative loan information in consumer borrowing decisions, and how providing easy-to-process comparative information improves decision making.

This project aims to improve our understanding of ‘demand-side factors’ related to why some small firms succeed and scale-up, while others do not.

This project examines the formal and informal institutions for dispute resolution used by microenterprises in Somalia, how access to them affects business outcomes and whether the provision of female-only saving and loan groups can redress gender imbalances in access to dispute resolution.