IGL database (beta)
Year | Title | Short summary | Country | Author | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2022 | Improving Management with Individual and Group-Based Consulting: Results from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia |
Differences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is then how to best improve poor management in developing countries. We test two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third of the cost of the individual approach. |
Colombia | Iacovone, L., Maloney, W., McKenzie, D. | |
2022 | Impact Evaluation of an Intervention on Small and Medium Enterprises in Chile |
This impact evaluation aims to measure the effect of a program that combines business training, mentoring, and a large cash transfer on high-potential small and medium businesses in Chile. 250 out of the top 500 firms participating in a business plan competition will be randomly selected to receive all three components of the program, while the remaining firms will receive none of them. In-person surveys with the entrepreneurs will be conducted before and 12 months after the program. |
Huneeus, F., Martínez Alvear, C., Woodruff, C. | | |
2022 | Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility? Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge |
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and ideas. In this paper, we focus on shedding light into this observed pattern by examining how evaluator expertise in the problem’s focal domain shapes the relationship between novelty and feasibility in evaluations of quality for technical solutions. |
Crusan, J., Lakhani, K., Lane, J., Menietti, M., Szajnfarber, Z. | | |
2022 | Leadership by Example to Empower Wineries to Take Action to Address Climate Change: Evidence from Japan |
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. |
Yokoo, H.-F., Kubo, T., Sasaki H. | | |
2022 | Capacity Building as a Route to Export Market Expansion : A Six-Country Experiment in the Western Balkans |
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 and appeal to foreign buyers. A six-country randomized experiment was conducted with 225 firms in the Western Balkans to test the effectiveness of 30 hours of live group-based training and 5 hours of one-on-one remote consulting in overcoming these constraints. |
Cusolito, A.P., Darova, O., Mckenzie, D.J. | | |
2022 | Evaluation of the Evolve Digital programme to promote digital adoption in family firms: A Randomised Control Trial |
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. |
Jibril, H., Mensmann, M., Roper, S., Scott, D. | | |
2022 | Impact Evaluation of an Intervention on Small and Medium Enterprises in Chile |
This impact evaluation aims to measure the effect of a program that combines business training, mentoring, and a large cash transfer on high-potential small and medium businesses in Chile. 250 out of the top 500 firms participating in a business plan competition will be randomly selected to receive all three components of the program, while the remaining firms will receive none of them. In-person surveys with the entrepreneurs will be conducted before and 12 months after the program. |
Huneeus, F., Martínez Alvear, C., Woodruff, C. | | |
2022 | Fintech Adoption by Retail Firms in an Emerging Market: Experimental Evidence of Tech, Marketing, and Financial Interventions |
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. |
Anderson, S., Kankanhalli, S., Iacovone, L., Narayanan, S. | | |
2022 | Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO |
Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights. |
deGrazia, C., Pairolero, N., Pappas, P.-A., Teodorescu, M., Toole, A. | | |
2022 | Gender Bias in Investment and Entrepreneurship in Ethiopia |
This lab-in-the-field experiment will measure the gender bias in entrepreneurship and investment among youth and credit officers in Ethiopia. Chigign Tobiya “Ethiopia Emerges” is a television show in Ethiopia where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of business tycoons for a chance to get investment funding. |
Buehren, N., Papineni, S. | | |
2022 | Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo |
What is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming peer connections themselves? This paper argues that entrepreneurs may be under-networked because they lack the necessary social skills that allow them to match efficiently with knowledgeable peers. |
Dimitriadis, S., Koning, R. | | |
2022 | Bias in Peer Review |
In many scientific contexts, peer review can be either single-blind or double-blind: in single-blind review, research work (e.g., manuscripts, proposals) is reviewed alongside information on the author(s), whereas in double-blind review, information on the author(s) is withheld. We will report results from a randomized experiment conducted in collaboration with a grantmaking body, in the context of the grantmaker reviewing proposals in one field of science. |
Levine, S., Stein, C., Williams, H. | | |
2022 | Evaluation of the Evolve Digital programme to promote digital adoption in family firms: A Randomised Control Trial |
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. |
Jibril, H., Mensmann, M., Roper, S., Scott, D. | | |
2022 | Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur: A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing and Outsourcing |
. A randomized experiment is conducted a in Nigeria to test the relative effectiveness of these different approaches in improving business practices. |
Nigeria | Anderson, S. J., McKenzie, D. | |
2022 | Impact Evaluation of an Intervention on Small and Medium Enterprises in Chile |
This impact evaluation aims to measure the effect of a program that combines business training, mentoring, and a large cash transfer on high-potential small and medium businesses in Chile. 250 out of the top 500 firms participating in a business plan competition will be randomly selected to receive all three components of the program, while the remaining firms will receive none of them. In-person surveys with the entrepreneurs will be conducted before and 12 months after the program. |
Huneeus, F., Martínez Alvear, C., Woodruff, C. | | |
2022 | Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO |
Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights. |
deGrazia, C., Pairolero, N., Pappas, P.-A., Teodorescu, M., Toole, A. | | |
2022 | Missing Information - Why Don’t More Firms Seek Out Business Advice? |
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. |
Bruhn, M., Piza, C. | | |
2022 | The Risk of Caution: Evidence from an R&D Experiment |
This experiment tries to understand how managers respond to uncertainty when making research and development decisions. Three experiments were conducted with master’s degree students in a program focused on the intersection of business and technology. |
Carson, R., Graff Zivin, J.S., Louviere, J., Sadoff, S., Shrader Jr, J.G. | | |
2022 | Using Individual-Level Randomized Treatment to Learn about Market Structure |
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. |
Casaburi, L., Reed, T. | | |
2022 | The Effects of STEM Summer Programs on College Major, Persistence, and Graduation for Underrepresented High School Students in the United States |
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a suite of such programs targeted to underrepresented high school students at an elite, technical institution. The STEM summer programs differ in their length (one week, six weeks, or six months) and modality (on-site or online). |
Cohodes, S., Ho, H., Robles, S.C. | | |
2022 | Evaluation of the Evolve Digital programme to promote digital adoption in family firms: A Randomised Control Trial |
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. |
Jibril, H., Mensmann, M., Roper, S., Scott, D. | | |
2022 | Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors’ Reputation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment |
This study analyses a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. |
Bernstein, S., Mehta, K., Townsend, R.R., & Xu T. | | |
2022 | (Co-)Working in Close Proximity: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions |
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. |
Catalini, C., Oettl, A., Roche, M.P. | | |
2022 | Information Frictions and Firm Take Up of Government Support: A Randomised Controlled Experiment |
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. |
Custodio, C., Hansman, C., Mendes, D. | | |
2022 | Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO |
Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights. |
deGrazia, C., Pairolero, N., Pappas, P.-A., Teodorescu, M., Toole, A. | | |
2022 | Behavioral Biases and Under-adoption of Business Practices |
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. |
De Oliveira, P. | | |
2022 | Evaluation of the Evolve Digital programme to promote digital adoption in family firms: A Randomised Control Trial |
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. |
Jibril, H., Mensmann, M., Roper, S., Scott, D. | | |
2022 | The Impact of Soft-Skills Training for Entrepreneurs in Jamaica |
A randomized control trial with 945 entrepreneurs in Jamaica shows positive shortterm impacts of soft-skills training on business outcomes. The effects are concentrated among men, and disappear twelve months after the training. |
Ubfal, D., Arraiz, I., Beuermann, D., Frese, M., Maffioli, A., Verch, D. | | |
2022 | Closing the Gender Gap in Patenting: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial at the USPTO |
Women are underrepresented in patenting and the gap is not closing quickly. One major roadblock to progress is a dearth of causal evidence on the potential effectiveness of policies to reduce the gender gap in patenting. Analyzing a randomized control trial at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that was designed to provide additional help to applicants who do not have legal representation, we find heterogeneous causal impacts across gender and technologies on the probability of obtaining patent rights. |
deGrazia, C., Pairolero, N., Pappas, P.-A., Teodorescu, M., Toole, A. | | |
2022 | Behavioral Biases and Under-adoption of Business Practices |
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. |
De Oliveira, P. | |