We conduct a randomized experiment in Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. In contrast to existing business training evaluations which are restricted to microfinance...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the first year after entry. Further, we find that firms with...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This paper examines whether the introduction of corporate governance (CG) reforms in general and that of transparency and disclosure (T&D) rules in particular can necessarily boost firm performance. Existing literature suggests that CG reforms can boost performance because it can resolve the...