There continues to be substantial debate on whether and how providing inclusive access to finance through microcredit promotes entrepreneurship-led development at the base of the pyramid. We contribute to this literature by examining differences in household-level outcomes associated with...

Free market advocates consider consumer choice unambiguously welfare-enhancing but consumers are often unable to make choices aligned with their well-being, and being disempowered might sometimes drive preference for products with questionable impact. We contribute to this debate on corporate...

The emerging practice of “impact investing” optimizes both financial and social outcomes, and thus promises to support hybrid organizations that simultaneously pursue financial and social goals. We argue, however, that impact investing decisions may be prone to behavioral factors that limit...

Firms serving base-of-the-pyramid markets often employ community-mediated exchange strategies that build and maintain exchange relationships with customers collectively, through community interactions. Prior research suggests that such strategies may engender positive peer influence that leads...

Research suggests that organizational viability may depend on the extent to which a sector is viewed as socio-politically legitimate. However, for what kind of organizations does the loss of sector legitimacy most affect financial sustainability? Econometric analyses using the Indian...

This paper examines the relationship between exogenous demand shock and market structure in India’s influenza vaccine markets. Using a novel dataset of detailed purchasing information for vaccines in India, and exploiting the 2009-10 global H1N1 pandemic as an exogenous demand shock, we...

We use monthly stock market indices for 58 countries to construct pairwise correlations of returns and explain these correlations with differences in the industrial structure across these countries. We find that countries with similar industries have stock markets that exhibit high correlation...

The empirical literature on the effect of trade agreements has reached a consensus that WTO effects are insignificant or modest at best especially compared to the robust and strong positive effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on bilateral trade (Rose, 2004; Eicher and Henn, 2011; Baier and...

We draw upon recent advances that combine causal inferences with machine learning, to show that poverty is the key income distribution measure that matters for development outcomes. In a predictive framework, we first show that LASSO chooses only the headcount measure of poverty from 37 income...

In this paper, we establish the importance of experience in international trade in reducing unmeasured trade costs and facilitating bilateral trade. We find a strong role for experience, measured in years of positive trade, for both aggregate and sectoral bilateral trade. In an augmented gravity...