This paper examines whether mobile money adoption can induce informal firms to formalize, an aspect that has been overlooked in the empirical literature. Despite several regulatory reforms such as simplifying tax systems and reducing the costs and time needed to register a business, informality...

Small businesses that have demonstrated high levels of pre-disaster local involvement are more likely to take an active role in community resilience during a disaster, regardless of their own financial security. Our investigation of small business survey responses about COVID-19 impacts finds...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht den IKT-Sektor in Nordrhein-Westfalen anhand von Sonderauswertungen der amtlichen Statistik des Umsatzsteuerpanels sowie der Daten einer eigenen Unternehmensbefragung. Dabei erweist sich dieses Bundesland als Standort mit einem weitgehend prosperierenden...

Most studies focus on trade effects and organizational outcomes of international standards, neglecting the effect of standards on employees. Using a two-year matched firm-employee panel dataset, this paper finds that the application of standards improves work conditions in small and medium...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht den IKT-Sektor in Nordrhein-Westfalen anhand von Sonderauswertungen der amtlichen Statistik des Umsatzsteuerpanels sowie der Daten einer eigenen Unternehmensbefragung. Dabei erweist sich dieses Bundesland als Standort mit einem weitgehend prosperierenden...

An often-heard argument is that South Africa's very high crime rate is the main reason for the country's small share of business ownership. Combining a fixed-effects model with an instrumental variable approach, we estimate the effect of crime on self-employment and business performance using a...

Sharing is a norm in many societies. We present a theoretical model on the trade-off between sharing and investment which we test on data from tailors in Burkina Faso. The empirical results support the idea that there are two behavioural patterns: entrepreneurs following an 'insurance regime'...

This paper investigates the existence and nature of constraints prevailing among Mexican microenterprises. It provides inter-temporal insights by relying on firm-level data spanning from 1994 to 2012. A performance index is defined based on firm levels of capital stock and monthly profits, and...

Do firms pay more taxes after formalization? The answer to this question is nontrivial. Tax noncompliance can be a persistent behavior among formerly informal firms. Analyzing the relationship between formalization and tax payments can also be challenging if nonswitching and switching firms have...

Exploiting China's anti-corruption campaign, we show that following a decrease in corruption, firm performance improves. Small and young firms benefit more. We identify the channels through which corruption hampers firm performance. Following the anti-corruption campaign, the allocation of...