The majority of enterprises in many developing countries have no paid workers. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Sri Lanka that provided wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises to test whether hiring additional labor would benefit such firms. In the presence of...

Governments around the world have introduced reforms to attempt to make it easier for informal firms to formalize. However, most informal firms have not gone on to become formal, especially when tax registration is involved. A randomized experiment based around the introduction of the...

This paper studies how migration from a poor to a rich country affects key economic beliefs, preference parameters, and transnational household decision-making efficiency. The setting is the migration of Tongans to New Zealand through a migration lottery program. In a 10-year follow-up survey of...

A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of US$50,000 each, is used to elicit beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the percent chance they would be...

Management has a large effect on the productivity of large firms. But does management matter in micro and small firms, where the majority of the labor force in developing countries works? This study developed 26 questions that measure business practices in marketing, stock-keeping,...

Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than 10 workers, with the modal firm consisting of just the owner. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs with the ability to grow their firms beyond this size? And, if so, can public policy help alleviate the constraints that prevent...

This paper compares the relative performance of man and machine in being able to predict outcomes for entrants in a business plan competition in Nigeria. The first human predictions are business plan scores from judges, and the second are simple ad hoc prediction models used by researchers. The...

Financial education programs are increasingly offered by governments, nonprofits, and financial institutions. However, voluntary participation rates in such programs are often very low, posing a severe challenge for randomized experiments attempting to measure their impact. This study uses a...

Small firms are an important source of income for the poor in developing countries, and the target of many interventions designed to help them grow. But there is no systematic information on the failure or death of such firms. The paper puts together 16 panel surveys from 12 different developing...

Jobs are the number one policy concern of policy makers in many countries. The global financial crisis, rising demographic pressures, high unemployment rates, and concerns over automation all make it seem imperative that policy makers employ increasingly more active labor market policies. This...