This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the country with the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firms enables the authors to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations that...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. The authors randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male-...

The degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non-random attrition from the...

Increased attention to the development potential of international migration has led to calls for greater global cooperation and for industrial countries to consider temporary worker programs and other options for increasing the number of immigrants admitted. But less attention has been devoted...

Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic pseudo-panel methods can...

Few representative surveys of households of migrants exist, limiting the analysis of the effects of international migration on sending families. This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to compare the performance of three alternative survey methods in collecting data from...

The paper uses individual level census and household survey data to present a rich profile of the young developing migrants around the world. Youth are found to comprise a large share of all migrants, particularly in migration to other developing countries, with the probability of migration...

Firm surveys often indicate that firms complain a lot about lack of access to financial services, but financing constraints are difficult to identify, given demand and supply considerations and with only surveys based on firms'perceptions. Specifically, it is difficult to separate demand for...

The author investigates whether contagion matters when emerging market firms cross-list their stocks in a developed capital market. She develops a rational expectations model where financial markets are segmented along emerging markets'borders and contagion spreads from one emerging market to...

Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innovation...