In the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the share of entrepreneurs who are women first rises and then falls with national income, which reverses the well-known U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and economic development. This paper presents a model of entrepreneurship in...

Many countries seek to promote exports by subsidizing market access, but evidence on such efforts has been mixed. We present the first randomized evaluation of a government financial-support program explicitly targeting exports, the Tasdir+ program in Tunisia. The program offered matching grants...

Does industrial concentration shape the life and death of cities? We identify settlements from historical maps of England and Wales (1790-1820), isolate exogenous variation in their late 19th-century size and industrial concentration, and estimate the causal impact of size and concentration on...

We investigate the long-term effects of export opportunities to a large destination market on multinational affiliates and domestic firms in a low-income host country. The US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement reduced US import tariffs on exports from Vietnam. Tariff reductions led to entry of...

Recent evidence suggests the U.S. business environment is changing, with rising market concentration and markups. The most prominent and extensive evidence backs out firm-level markups from the first-order conditions for variable factors. The markup is identified as the ratio of the variable...

We study the demand for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and...

We document a process of rapid tertiarization of the Chinese economy since 2005. The employment and value-added shares of the service sector have increased significantly. Moreover, total factor productivity growth has increased faster in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector....

In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

The expansion in farm size is an important contributor to agricultural productivity in developed countries, but the reallocation process is hindered in less developed economies. How do distortions to factor reallocation affect farm dynamics and agricultural productivity? We develop a model of...

Firms frequently fail to adopt profitable business opportunities even when they do not face informational or liquidity constraints. We explore three behavioral frictions that explain inertia among individuals--present bias, limited memory, and distrust--in a managerial setting. In partnership...