Should governments in developing countries directly support firms with policies such as grants, subsidized loans, and training and consulting programs, or should they instead just aim to enact sensible...
Digital technology offers the potential to lower the costs of delivering business training, and to enable it to be scaled across a wide geographic area. But there are questions about how feasible such...
Only one in seven of the world’s population have ever migrated, despite the enormous gains in income possible through international and internal movement. The author examines the evidence for different...
Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments...
Colombia’s exports are highly concentrated in a few commodities such as petroleum, coal, coffee, and gold. A key policy goal is to diversify and expand this export base. However, one key barrier to being...
The limited market size of many small emerging economies is a key constraint to the growth of innovative small and medium enterprises. Exporting offers a potential solution, but firms may struggle to locate...
Many research and policy questions surrounding migration are causal questions. What causes people to migrate? What are the consequences of migration for the migrants, their families, and their communities?...
One of the key challenges facing innovative small and medium enterprises is customer acquisition. This is especially a constraint in less populated countries like those in the Western Balkans, where domestic...
Irregular migration from Africa to Europe attracts substantial policy attention. Although international migration can enable people from developing countries to dramatically increase their incomes, the...
Irregular migration from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara and Mediterranean is extremely risky for migrants and a key policy concern. A cluster-randomized experiment with 3,641 young men from 391...
Only one in seven of the world’s population has ever migrated, despite the enormous gains in income possible through international and internal movement. This paper examines the evidence for different...
The predictions of different classic migration theories are tested by using incentivized laboratory experiments to investigate how potential migrants decide between working in different destinations. First...
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in overall international mobility. However, this disruption of legal pathways to migration has raised concerns...
Why do more small firms in developing countries not use the market for professional business services like accounting, marketing, and human resource specialists? Two key reasons may be that firms lack...
A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort...
Many small firms lack the finance and marketing skills needed for firm growth. The standard approach in many business support programs is to attempt to train the entrepreneur to develop these skills, through...
This note reports on a new approach to improving business practices in growing firms - using the market to insource or outsource skills instead of training the entrepreneur.
This note examines how sensitive the demand for business training is to price, and whether charging a higher price causes firm owners to exert more effort in training.
Business training programs are typically offered for free. Charging for training provides potential benefits including financial sustainability, but little is known about how price affects the demand for...
Despite the popularity of business training among policy makers, the use of business training has faced increasing skepticism. This is, in part, fueled by the fact that most of the first wave of randomized...