We conduct a randomized experiment in Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. In contrast to existing business training evaluations which are restricted to microfinance...

The majority of firms in most developing countries are informal. We conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka which provided incentives for informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about the registration process and reimbursement for direct registration costs had no impact on...

Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innovation...

In a recent randomized experiment we found mean returns to capital of between 5 and 6 percent per month in Sri Lankan microenterprises, much higher than market interest rates. But returns were found to be much higher among men than among women, and indeed were not different from zero for women....

Is the vast army of the self-employed in low income countries a source of employment generation? We use data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with wage workers and with owners of larger firms. We use a rich set of measures of...

Small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries.The rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms haveproductive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given theopportunity...

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the...

Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self-employed. In the United States, however, rates of self-employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial...

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the countrywith the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firmsenables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations thatcan affect...

Few representative surveys of households of migrants exist, limiting our ability to study theeffects of international migration on sending families. We report the results of an experimentdesigned to compare the performance of three alternative survey methods in collecting datafrom...