We study business uncertainty in high- versus low-volatility environments by surveying over 31,000 managers across 41 countries. We elicit subjective probability distributions for future own-firm sales and measure firm-level uncertainty with their mean absolute deviations. Analogously, we...

As the productivity of the European economy shows signs of slowing down, many hopes are pinned on digital technologies to reverse this trend. This study uses data from the EIBIS 2019 survey to examine whether the adoption of different digital technologies (such as advanced robotics, 3D printing,...

This paper studies the impact of services liberalization on education and the gender education gap at the district level in India. We focus on the time period 1987 to 1999 and three services sectors - banking, insurance and telecommunications - which were all state monopolies, have been heavily...

Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) for Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008, both under the assumption of an exogenous or an endogenous law of motion for productivity. The authors first obtain TFP estimates under each alternative...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...

Do export promotion agencies (EPAs) impact the probability of non-exporting firms to export? In the last decade many countries have introduced EPAs to support their firrms in order to deal with asymmetric information problems and make feasible additional gains from trade. Some recent studies...

A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. We revisit these entrepreneurs after seven years, and find long-lasting average impacts of personal initiative training...

This paper presents evidence on the role of the endowment effect in shaping the risk-taking behavior of entrepreneurs, and how the potential of losing their firms lead them to take higher risks. This study uses an experimental design with 466 entrepreneurs in Cali, Colombia. Results show that...