A strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies, as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest. Lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises, which account for a...

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 (Campos et al, 2017). This paper revisits these entrepreneurs after seven years, and finds long-lasting average impacts of...

The post-double selection Lasso estimator has become a popular way of selecting control variables when analyzing randomized experiments. This is done to try to improve precision, and reduce bias from attrition or chance imbalances. This paper re-estimates 780 treatment effects from published...

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. We conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of...

We examine the long-term impacts of international migration by comparing immigrants who had successful ballot entries in a migration lottery program, and first moved almost a decade ago, with people who had unsuccessful entries into those same ballots. The long-term gain in income is found to be...

This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program....

Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firms in a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by...

Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firms in a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by...