Most firms in developing countries are informal. Does it make sense for them to formalize? Hernando de Soto has famously argued that informal firms would like to be formal, only that burden some entry barriers prevent them. The result, spurred by the efforts of doing business and investment...

Traditional economic models of investment such as the Ramsey model would predict that such grants should have at most temporary effects. In such models, there is an efficient steady state size for a business conditional on the ability of the owner. A positive shock to capital in such a model...

The latest note examines the impact of a social enterprise's attempts to shorten the supply chain between farmers and small retail stores in Bogota, an idea that was one of the winners of the SME ideas competition. The small retail stores that are prevalent on many street corners in developing...

The latest note tests two different approaches to improving management, and finds a novel group-based approach to be more cost-effective than the standard approach of providing consulting to individual firms

This note shows how big data can help combine experimental with non-experimental approaches in impact evaluations when take-up is low. In this study, author have access to a large administrative data set (of 660 MB), which follows the monthly financial indicators of each client for up to 18...

Business training is one of the most common support services offered by governments to small firms around the world. However, a number of evaluations of such training programs have struggled to identify impacts, and an additional concern has been that any growth of trained firms might at the...