Payroll taxes in Sweden were reduced substantially for people ages 26 years or younger on July 1, 2007. The objective of this tax cut was to lower youth unemployment. The question of how gains from payroll taxes are distributed between workers and owners of firms has been the focus of...

Creating productive jobs is one of the greatest challenges in Ghana. This paper looks at job creation and its relationship with firm productivity and the quality of jobs among registered firms in the Ghanaian private sector, based on the 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey. The study looks at the...

The subject of which firms are the key employers?and which of these create or destroy jobs at a faster rate?is eminently important for academics and policy makers. The relative importance of small versus large firms and old versus young firms has in particular been extensively debated and...

This paper uses a unique data set of panel firms from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys in 47 economies, to provide estimates of the patterns of firm exit, and analyzes various firm characteristics and conditions under which firms leave the market. Firms' labor productivity and age are...

This paper presents new evidence that cronyism reduces long-term economic growth by discouraging firms' innovation activities. The analysis is based on novel establishment survey data from The Arab Republic of Egypt which provides information on establishments' political connections, their...

An expanding body of literature has shown that better management practices can offer significant boosts to firms' productivity; this research illustrates that firms in South America are no exception. Using recent Enterprise Survey data from seven countries in South America (Argentina, Bolivia,...

To what extent do firms use trust, law, and third-parties to ensure fulfillment of agreements to transact? How do they combine these mechanisms to form transactional governance structures? How do answers to these questions vary across countries? Generating the relevant data requires constructing...

This paper details the results from the first comprehensive survey of private firms across major urban areas in the Syrian Arab Republic -- including Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Damascus -- since the conflict began in 2011. This builds on the World Bank's Enterprise Survey from 2009 and...

New representative survey data for Harare, Zimbabwe are used to analyze the conditions under which informal businesses encounter requests for bribes. A simple model develops basic expectations of bribe exposure: those with higher opportunity costs of formalizing and with a higher ability to pay...