IGL Trials Database

IGL curates a database with randomised controlled trials in the field of innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. Browse our list of topics, see it as a map, or use the search function below.

2022
Custodio, C., Hansman, C., Mendes, D.

This paper studies whether informational frictions prevent firms from accessing government support using a randomised controlled trial. We focus on two Portuguese COVID-19 relief programs, providing (i) wage support for workers who are kept on payroll and (ii) credit lines backed by government guarantees. We randomly assign firms to a treatment providing either simplified information about a program, or a combination information and step-by-step application support. We find a significant treatment effect on take up of the wage support program.

2022
Fairlie, R., Turner, P.

This project is a collaboration with Corner to Corner to study the impact of their entrepreneurship training course on financial stability. Corner to Corner, a Nashville-based nonprofit, is focused on their mission of helping their neighbors to flourish and addressing the racial wealth gap. One of their primary programs is The Academy, a 10-week entrepreneurship training course that teaches students the fundamentals of starting and operating their own business.

2022
Yokoo, H.-F., Kubo, T., Sasaki H.

Climate change poses an urgent and existential threat to the wine sector. However, it is not easy for wineries and farmers to take action to reduce carbon emission comparing to adaptation. How can we encourage these actions? Farmers often seek information before take action, which influences their current risk perceptions of extreme weather condition or moral norms. Regarding the information, a positive approach focusing on empowering farmers to take action to address climate change is generally more successful at engaging people and minimizing defensive reactions.

2022
Brune, L., Giné, X., Karlan, D.

Microcredit promised business growth for small firms lacking access to banking loans. Although microcredit has reached millions, recent randomized evaluations find limited average business impacts. Critics often blame contract rigidity, specifically the fixed and frequent installments, for the lack of productive risk-taking. But such rigidity may instill borrower discipline. This study partnered with a Colombian lender that offered first-time borrowers a flexible loan that permitted delaying up to three monthly repayments.

2022
Biasi, B., Ma, S.

This paper studies the dissemination of frontier knowledge through higher education. Applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the text of 1.7M university course syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a measure of a syllabus’s distance from frontier knowledge. Using this measure, we document four new facts. First, courses differ greatly in their education-innovation gap, even after controlling for field, course-level, and time. Second, instructors play an important role in shaping course content.

2022
Bruhn, M., Piza, C.

This paper tests whether providing more information on business practices can lead firms to seek out advice and improve their practices. The authors collaborated with a business advice provider in Brazil to implement a randomized experiment with 866 small firms. The treatment groups received different versions of an information sheet that benchmarked business practices to other firms and listed five practices to improve.

2022
Jibril, H., Mensmann, M., Roper, S., Scott, D.

The ‘Evolve Digital’ trial was developed with the objective of boosting digital adoption in small family firms through identifying a cost-effective, yet productivity-enhancing programme of peer group learning for small family businesses, which can be replicated throughout the country.

2022
De Oliveira, P.

The study investigates the role of information constraints and behavioral biases in the under-adoption of key business practices by micro-enterprises in Brazil. We combine a randomized control trial with online surveys to study these questions.

2022
Anderson, S. J., McKenzie, D.

. A randomized experiment is conducted a in Nigeria to test the relative effectiveness of these different approaches in improving business practices.

2022
Casaburi, L., Reed, T.

Interference across competing firms in RCTs can be informative about market structure. An experiment that subsidizes a random subset of traders who buy cocoa from farmers in Sierra Leone illustrates this idea. Interpreting treatment-control differences in prices and quantities purchased from farmers through a model of Cournot competition reveals differentiation between traders is low. Combining this result with quasi-experimental variation in world prices shows that the number of traders competing is 50 percent higher than the number operating in a village.

2022
Catalini, C., Oettl, A., Roche, M.P.

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-startup knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology co-working hubs in the United States. Relying on the random assignment of office space to the hub's 251 startups, we find that proximity positively influences knowledge spillovers as proxied by the likelihood of adopting an upstream web technology already used by a peer startup.

2022
Catalini, C., Oettl, A., Roche, M.P.

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-startup knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology co-working hubs in the United States. Relying on the random assignment of office space to the hub's 251 startups, we find that proximity positively influences knowledge spillovers as proxied by the likelihood of adopting an upstream web technology already used by a peer startup.

2022
Bernstein, S., Mehta, K., Townsend, R.R., & Xu T.

This study analyses a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs.

2022
Anderson, S., Kankanhalli, S., Iacovone, L., Narayanan, S.

Across developing economies, cash is the conduit for retail transactions. Policymakers, multinational product manufacturers and marketers of electronic payment systems are interested in understanding how to stimulate the growth of electronic payments in emerging markets. In this paper, we investigate what hinders the adoption of e-payment technology by traditional retailers, in particular, whether barriers to adoption are technological, informational or financial in nature.

2022
Bartos, B., Castro, S., Czura, K., Opitz, T.

We seek to understand what is limiting women's access to finance, in particular for highly skilled start-up entrepreneurs. To investigate supply side constraints, we run a lab-in-the-field experiment in which loan officers in Uganda evaluate several business ideas based on real pitch decks from start-ups. We separate biases in idea evaluation from other constraints (such as gender specific differences in the ability to implement a project, or in external constraints that start-up entrepreneurs are facing).

2021
Anderson S., Mckenzie D.

This study asks why more small firms in developing countries do not use the market for professional business services like accounting, marketing, and human resource specialists and asks how this could be altered.

2021
Barsoum, G., Crépon, B., Gardiner, D., Michel, B., Parienté, W.

This trial measures the impact of an edutainment program specifically designed to promote entrepreneurship among young adult viewers in Egypt.

2021
McKenzie, D., Mohpal, A., Yang D.

This randomised experiment tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations among poor entrepreneurs.

2021
Cusolito, A.P., McKenzie, D.

This experiment tests the impact of a program with the main goal of helping firms to attract new customers, expand markets, adapt their business model, and bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic by boosting demand for their products.

2021
Calder-Wang, S., Gompers, P., Huang, K.

This paper studies the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams.

2021
Novelli , E., Spina, C.

Prior research suggests that firms in entrepreneurial settings benefit from a scientific approach to decision making that combines cognitive and evidence-based components. But to what extent and under what conditions is the scientific approach to decision-making associated with superior performance?

2021
Janes, L., Koelle, M., Quinn, S.

Do capital grants improve microenterprise productivity? We use the lens of a production function to re-examine two previous randomised controlled trials that allocated capital to microenterprises. We find that productivity is higher for treated firms, and accounts for about 20-30 percent of the revenue effects of capital grants. Although long-run estimates are noisy, point estimates indicate that these productivity effects are sustained six years after the grants.

2021
Alan, S., Corekcioglu, G., Sutter, M.

This project evaluated the impact of a program aiming to improve the workplace climate in corporations.

2021
Camuffo, A., Gambardella, A., Messinese, D., Novelli, E., Paolucci, E., Spina, C.

The model shows that managers and entrepreneurs make better decisions under uncertainty if they adopt a scientific approach in which they formulate and test theories.

2021
Chioda, L., Contreras-Loya, D., Gertler, P., Carney, D.

This paper studies the medium-term impacts of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program, an innovative in-residence 3-week mini-MBA program for high school students modeled after western business school curricula and adapted to the Ugandan context.

2021
Chaurey, R., Gu, Y., Nayyar, G., Sharma, S., Verhoogen, E.

This project aims to understand the determinants of adoption of a new technology by firms in Bangladesh's leather goods and footwear industry.

2021
Blimpoa, M. P., Pugatch, T.

This study assesses, via a field experiment, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper secondary entrepreneurship course. Both groups received the government’s standard training. In addition, the treatment group was assigned intensive training organized by an NGO for two years.

2021
Moberg, S. K.

A randomised controlled trial has been performed in which 580 randomly selected pupils (aged 14-15) have been randomly assigned to participate in online programmes that focus either on entrepreneurship or on environmental issues. . The short-term results show that the programme focusing on entrepreneurship had a significantly positive influence on the participants’ entrepreneurial intentions, venture creation self-efficacy, entrepreneurial attitudes and perceived knowledge about entrepreneurship

2021
Bryan, G., Karlan, D., Osman A.

We experimentally study the impact of substantially larger enterprise loans, in collaboration with an Egyptian lender. Larger loans generate small average impacts, but machine learning using psychometric data reveals dramatic heterogeneity. Top-performers (i.e., those with the highest predicted treatment effects) substantially increase profits, whereas profits for poor-performers drop. The magnitude of this difference implies that an individual lender’s credit allocation choices matter for aggregate income.

2021
Anderson-Macdonald, S., Kankanhalli, S., Iacovone, L., Narayanan, S.

This paper studies the impact of business modernization on the sales performance of traditional retailers. We define modernization as adopting tangible structures and business practices of organized retail chains (for example, exterior signage with store name and logo, or a database to record product-level information). To address our research question, we implement a randomized field experiment in Mexico City with 1148 traditional retail firms.

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