Sectoral segregation is often used to explain a large part of a well-documented gender earnings gap in business profits. Women tend to sort into different sectors than men, and the sectors dominated by women tend to be less profitable. This paper investigates the horizontal dimension of sectoral...

Is there a mindset gap holding women back in business? Can entrepreneurship training instill a set of attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that are thought to underpin success in business such as motivation, perseverance, and self-confidence? This study conducted two randomized controlled trials...

Business practices and performance vary widely among local peers. This paper identifies key determinants of such heterogeneity among a sample of small urban retail shops in Indonesia, and experimentally tests whether learning about the best practices of local peers is valuable for business...

Mental health, well-being and lasting economic outcomes are intimately connected. However, in geographies marked by fragility, conflict and violence, entrepreneurs of small and medium-size experience chronic stress and poor mental health on a regular basis. This paper describes the incremental...

Business survey outcomes for micro and small firms are notoriously noisy, with multiple sources of measurement and recall error. This paper introduces a new survey methodology that combines automatic consistency checks of electronic data collection with triangulation and dynamic adjustment to...

During the past decades, firms from emerging economies have significantly increased the amount of financing obtained in capital markets. Whereas the literature argues that international markets have been an important contributor to this process, the role of domestic markets is mostly unknown. By...

Gender disparities in small and medium-size enterprise lending exist around the world and impede the growth of millions of women-led firms. This paper examines a potential driver of these disparities: gender-biased loan officers. Officer bias is measured through a novel loan application...

Using multiple sources of national- and firm-level data around the world, this paper investigates how the effects of the business environment depend on whether themeasure is de jure or de facto, and how business environment effects differ by ownership and size. The paper compares estimates of...

This paper examines the effect of Basel III implementation on the access to finance of small and medium-size enterprises in 32 emerging markets and developing economies. Analyzing rich, repeated cross-sectional data and a panel of matched firm-bank data in a difference-in-differences setting...

This paper provides evidence that commercial lenders in Peru free ride off their peers' screening efforts. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, the study finds that competing lenders responded to additional loan approvals by issuing approvals of their own....