Many governments have spent much of the past decade trying to extend a helping hand to informal businesses by making it easier and cheaper for them to formalize. Much less effort has been devoted to raising the costs of remaining informal, through increasing enforcement of existing regulations....

We show how financial and managerial constraints impede experimentation and thus limit learning about the profitability of investments. Imperfect information about one's own type, but willingness to experiment to learn one's type, leads to short-run negative expected returns to investments, with...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to...

In the early 1990s the World Bank launched the Regional Program on Enterprise Development in several African countries, a key component of which was the collection of manufacturing firm-level data. In this paper the authors review the research based on the data sets generated by these and...

What role does the business environment play in promoting and restraining firm growth? Recent literature points to a number of factors as obstacles to growth. Inefficient functioning of financial markets, inadequate security and enforcement of property rights, poor provision of infrastructure,...

Spanish Abstract: El presente documento expone una aproximación teórica y una exploración empírica de la estructura financiera de las pequeñas, micro y medianas empresas para el caso peruano bajo un contexto de dualidad tecnológica y productiva

This empirical research investigates how bribery by firms influences their development. We acquired the most recent firm-level data from four Latin American countries — Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru — and looked into the firms' innovation capability. We also used a translog function...

We partnered with a micro-lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no-loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with...

This theoretical study attempts to sketch an initial picture of diversified micro- enterprises (0-9 employees) in transitional economies, such as those in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). A framework of political, economic and legal...