Take-up of voluntary financial education programs is typically extremely low. This paper reports on randomized experiments around a large financial literacy course offered in Mexico City to understand the reasons for low take-up, and to measure the impact of financial education. It documents...

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. This paper undertakes a critical review of these studies...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries. Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of...

Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and...

We conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban 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. We study two groups of women: a random sample operating subsistence enterprises...

This study uses administrative data to evaluate the impact of Minas Fácil Expresso, a programme in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which expanded a business start-up simplification programme to more remote municipalities. Using difference-in-differences with 56 months of registration data...

Firm productivity is low in African countries, prompting governments to try a number of active policies to improve it. Yet despite the millions of dollars spent on these policies, we are far from a situation where we know whether many of them are yielding the desired payoffs. This paper...