Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Increasing Productivity and Safety of SMEs by Monitoring Drivers in Kenya’s Public Transport Sector

This project will provide monitoring technology to SMEs in a randomized controlled trial to improve their ability to write effective contracts with their employees.

Research Project
15 Dec 2016

Microenterprise Development as a Poverty-Reduction Strategy in Nepal: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Factors Determining Microenterprise Performance

Using the data enumerated from 501 randomly-sampled micro-entrepreneurs, and several case studies, interviews, and focus groups discussions across three ecological belts in Nepal, this study revealed a significant increase in profit, sales and assets of microenterprises over the period, and ident

Research Note
15 Dec 2016

Challenges to Small and Medium-size Businesses in Myanmar: What are they and how do we know?

Kapteyn and Wah (2016) conducted a field survey of owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Yangon, Myanmar to investigate obstacles to business development in the region. The analysis focuses on access to credit, public services, and electricity.

Journal Article
1 Dec 2016

Rethinking Indonesia's Informal Sector

This paper, published in World Development reviews competing theories about the causes of informality in developing countries and uses new data to determine which theory best explains the persistence and scale of Indonesia’s informal sector.

Journal Article
1 Apr 2016

Improving Entrepreneurs’ Access to Information: A Randomised Controlled Trial on Marketing and Financial Information for Small Firm Owners in Rwanda

This research seeks to address a significant constraint to growth among private enterprises in low income countries: access to business information.

Research Project
9 Mar 2016

Determinants of Microenterprise Performance in Nepal

Although the literature on entrepreneurship studies has contributed significantly in improving our insights regarding the factors determining the enterprise performance in a broader sense, there has been a little research concerning the factors determining the microen

Journal Article
1 Oct 2015

Direct and Indirect Impacts of Credit for SMEs

This randomized controlled trial in partnership with a development bank in the Philippines employs credit scoring for small and medium enterprise (SME) lending and measures the impact of credit on SME growth - both directly for firms receiving loans and indirectly for their competitors.

Research Note
19 Jun 2015

Differentiation, Property Rights, and Performance Among Micro-entrepreneurs

In contexts where ownership as a mode of access to productive assets is limited, research shows that leasing has a strong positive impact on micro-entrepreneur performance and differentiation from competitors.

Research Note
10 Apr 2015

Contractual Flexibility, Firm Growth, and Information Asymmetries in Microfinance: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh (Stage Two)

A randomized pilot experiment of BRAC Microfinance’s new flexible loan contract provides information on credit take-up, the pool of borrowers, and the potential for moral hazard abatement among microfinance borrowers. 

Research Project
25 Feb 2015

Mitigating Market Frictions by Monitoring Employees in SMEs: A Field Experiment in Kenya's Public Transport Sector (Stage One)

A field experiment to fit Kenyan minibuses with GPS fleet management technology will provide information about the effect of monitoring on market frictions and negative externalities due to driver behaviour. 

Research Project
25 Feb 2015

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