This report examines international policy experiences in designing and implementing online business diagnostic tools for SME and entrepreneurship development. These tools offer entrepreneurs and small business managers an individual online assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of their...

This paper takes stock of one year of policy responses to the 2022/2023 energy crisis triggered by Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine from the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper, "SME policy responses" are defined as all government policies, whether...

Digitalisation has triggered a profound transformation of the retail sector, primarily composed of SMEs. While retail businesses are embracing more hybrid practices of managing online and brick-and-mortar channels, getting more traditional SME retailers fit for the hybrid era could open up new...

We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a...

Timely and accurate measurement of AI use by firms is both challenging and crucial for understanding the impacts of AI on the U.S. economy. We provide new, real-time estimates of current and expected future use of AI for business purposes based on the Business Trends and Outlook Survey for...

In the presence of markup differences, externalities and other social considerations, the equilibrium direction of innovation can be systematically distorted. This paper builds a simple model of endogenous technology, which generalizes existing comparative static results and characterizes...

Abstract U.S. firms have reduced their investment in scientific research ("R") compared to product development ("D"), raising questions about the returns to each type of investment, and about the reasons for this shift. We use Census data that disaggregates "R" from "D" to study how US firms...

We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor composition of their parent...

This paper uses a large language model to develop an ex-ante measure of the commercial potential of scientific findings. In addition to validating the measure against the typical holdout sample, we validate it externally against 1.) the progression of scientific findings through a major...

Understanding factors affecting the direction of innovation is a central aim of research in the economics of innovation. Progress on this topic has been inhibited by difficulties in measuring distance and movement in knowledge space. We describe a methodology that infers the mapping of the...