Showing 1 - 10 of 10
In developing economies, mobile-linked services have the potential to significantly reduce transaction costs and provide a truly new conduit that could be used to facilitate the flow of savings into banks. We test this premise by introducing a product that permits Sri Lankan households to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481004
We show how to use commuting flows to infer the spatial distribution of income within a city. A simple workplace choice model predicts a gravity equation for commuting flows whose destination fixed effects correspond to wages. We implement this method with cell phone transaction data from Dhaka...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482731
Longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation, since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time. Previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life-expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464702
Sri Lanka has a significant chronic unemployment problem. Depending on time period and the definition of unemployment it varies from the low teens to over twenty percent. Nearly all of this unemployment is concentrated among young people who are looking for their first job. Unemployment duration...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012475223
Several field experiments find positive returns to grants for male and not female micro-entrepreneurs. But, these analyses largely overlook that male and female micro-entrepreneurs often belong to the same household. Using data from randomized trials in India, Sri Lanka and Ghana, we show that...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455323
The majority of enterprises in developing countries have no paid workers. Is this optimal, or the result of frictions in labor markets? We conduct an experiment providing wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises in Sri Lanka. In the presence of frictions, a short-term subsidy could...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012455675
We examine the generalizability of internally valid estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks. This temporal external validity is shown to depend upon the distribution of the aggregate shocks and the interaction between these...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012456228
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? We develop 26 questions that measure business practices in marketing, stock-keeping, record-keeping, and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457163
When households increase their deposits in formal bank savings accounts, what is the source of the money? We combine high-frequency surveys with an experiment in which a Sri Lankan bank used mobile Point-of-Service (POS) terminals to collect deposits directly from households each week. In this...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457930
We conduct a field experiment in Sri Lanka providing informal firms incentives to formalize. Information about the registration process and reimbursement of direct costs has no effect. Payments equivalent to one-half to one month (alternatively, 2 months) of the median firm's profits leads to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460640