Using multiple sources of national- and firm-level data around the world, this paper investigates how the effects of the business environment depend on whether themeasure is de jure or de facto, and how business environment effects differ by ownership and size. The paper compares estimates of...

Sectoral segregation is often used to explain a large part of a well-documented gender earnings gap in business profits. Women tend to sort into different sectors than men, and the sectors dominated by women tend to be less profitable. This paper investigates the horizontal dimension of sectoral...

Business practices and performance vary widely among local peers. This paper identifies key determinants of such heterogeneity among a sample of small urban retail shops in Indonesia, and experimentally tests whether learning about the best practices of local peers is valuable for business...

Business survey outcomes for micro and small firms are notoriously noisy, with multiple sources of measurement and recall error. This paper introduces a new survey methodology that combines automatic consistency checks of electronic data collection with triangulation and dynamic adjustment to...