Despite the importance of agglomeration externalities in theoretical work, evidence for their nature, scale, and scope remains elusive, particularly in developing countries.
In this paper published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Cai and Szeidl (2018) organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance.
Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that economic incentives should determine when elites resist democracy. Naidu, Robinson and Young (2017) argue that the capacity to organize coups against democracy is also important, and is shaped by the structure of the social network.
Microfinance lenders make limited credit offers because of operational challenges of extensive screening and selection process. We study if optimizing a referral protocol can be used to recruit good entrepreneurs and thus increase access to credit.
This project aims to test whether poor social networks are a key factor limiting the rise of entrepreneurial behaviour in rural areas of low-income countries.
Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elite incentives to mount a coup depend on the threat that democracy represents to them and what they stand to gain from dictatorship.
Regular meetings between managers of young Chinese firms substantially improved firm performance. Channels included learning from peers and new supplier-client matches. This research note also discusses the project, "Finance and Networks in China".
Developing country entrepreneurs often face family pressure to share income. This pressure, a “kinship tax”, can discourage the most able entrepreneurs from expanding their firms.
Rigol and Roth (2016) report results from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India in which they test the viability of two kinds of monetary payment rules used to incentivize truth-telling: a novel payment rule that relies on ex-post verification of reports and pee
