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  • 1
    UID:
    almafu_9958097424602883
    Format: 1 online resource (35 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Is the vast army of the self-employed in low income countries a source of employment generation? This paper uses data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with wage workers and with owners of larger firms. The authors use a rich set of measures of background, ability, and attitudes, including lottery experiments measuring risk attitudes. Consistent with the International Labor Organization's views of the self employed (represented by Tokman), the analysis finds that two-thirds to three-quarters of the own account workers have characteristics which are more like wage workers than larger firm owners. This suggests the majority of the own account workers are unlikely to become employers. Using a two and a half year panel of enterprises, the authors show that the minority of own account workers who are more like larger firm owners are more likely to expand by adding paid employees. The results suggest that finance is not the sole constraint to growth of microenterprises, and provides an explanation for the low rates of growth of enterprises supported by microlending.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 2
    UID:
    almafu_9958074877002883
    Format: 1 online resource (29 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: A large share of the world's poor is self-employed. Accurate measurement of profits from microenterprises is therefore critical for studying poverty and inequality, measuring the returns to education, and evaluating the success of microfinance programs. But a myriad of problems plague the measurement of profits. The authors report on a variety of different experiments conducted to better understand the importance of some of these problems and to draw recommendations for collecting profit data. In particular, they (1) examine how far we can reconcile self-reported profits and reports of revenue minus expenses through more detailed questions; (2) examine recall errors in sales and report on the results of experiments which randomly allocated account books to firms; and (3) ask firms how much firms like theirs underreport sales in surveys like this, and have research assistants observe the firms at random times 15-16 times during a month to provide measures for comparison. The authors conclude that firms underreport revenues by about 30 percent, that account diaries have significant effects on both revenues and expenses but not on profits, and that simply asking profits provides a more accurate measure of firm profits than detailed questions on revenues and expenses.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 3
    UID:
    almafu_9958074876802883
    Format: 1 online resource (37 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries. The rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms have productive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given the opportunity. However, measuring the return to capital is complicated by unobserved factors such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks, which are likely to be correlated with capital stock. The authors use a randomized experiment to overcome this problem and to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample, regardless of whether they apply for credit. They accomplish this by providing cash and equipment grants to small firms in Sri Lanka, and measuring the increase in profits arising from this exogenous (positive) shock to capital stock. After controlling for possible spillover effects, the authors find the average real return to capital to be 5.7 percent a month, substantially higher than the market interest rate. They then examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects to explore whether missing credit markets or missing insurance markets are the most likely cause of the high returns. Returns are found to vary with entrepreneurial ability and with measures of other sources of cash within the household, but not to vary with risk aversion or uncertainty.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 4
    UID:
    almafu_9958143904102883
    Format: 1 online resource (60 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: The majority of enterprises in many developing countries have no paid workers. This paper reports on a field experiment conducted in Sri Lanka that provided wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises to test whether hiring additional labor would benefit such firms. In the presence of labor market frictions, a short-term subsidy could have a lasting impact on firm employment. Using 12 rounds of surveys to track dynamics four years after the end of the subsidy, the study finds that firms increased employment during the subsidy period, but there was no lasting impact on employment, profitability, or sales. Two supplementary interventions and treatment heterogeneity suggest the lack of impact is not due to complementarities with capital or management skills, and detailed survey data help rule out a number of theoretical mechanisms that could result in sub-optimally low employment. The study concludes that the urban labor market facing microenterprises does not have large frictions that would prevent own-account workers from becoming employers.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
    URL: Volltext  (kostenfrei)
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  • 5
    UID:
    almafu_9958143955202883
    Format: 1 online resource (44 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Accurate measurement of stock levels, turnover, and profitability in microenterprises in developing countries is difficult because the majority of these firms do not keep detailed records. This paper tests the use of radio frequency identification tags as a means of objectively measuring stock levels and stock flow in small retail firms in Sri Lanka. In principle, the tags offer the potential to track stock movements accurately. The paper compares the stock counts obtained from RFID reads to physical stock counts and to survey responses. There are three main findings. First, current RFID-technology is more difficult to use, and more time-consuming to employ, than had been envisaged. Second, the technology works reasonably well for paper products, but very poorly for most products sold by microenterprises: on average only about one-quarter of the products tagged could be read and there was considerable day-to-day variation in read-efficiency. Third, a comparison of survey responses and physical stock-takes shows much higher accuracy for survey measures. As a result, the study concludes that this technology is currently unsuitable for improving stock measurement in microenterprises, except perhaps for a few products.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 6
    UID:
    almafu_9958246431202883
    Format: 1 online resource (42 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: The authors conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business program. They work with two representative groups of women: a random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises and a random sample of women who are out of the labor force but interested in starting a business. They track the impacts of two treatments - training only and training plus a cash grant - over two years with four follow-up surveys and find that the short and medium-term impacts differ. For women already in business, training alone leads to some changes in business practices but has no impact on business profits, sales or capital stock. In contrast, the combination of training and a grant leads to large and significant improvements in business profitability in the first eight months, but this impact dissipates in the second year. For women interested in starting enterprises, business training speeds up entry but leads to no increase in net business ownership by the final survey round. Both profitability and business practices of the new entrants are increased by training, suggesting training may be more effective for new owners than for existing businesses. The study also finds that the two treatments have selection effects, leading to entrants being less analytically skilled and poorer.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
    URL: Volltext  (kostenfrei)
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  • 7
    UID:
    almafu_9958246214302883
    Format: 1 online resource (44 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Using data from surveys of enterprises in Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, the authors undertake the first microeconomic study of the recovery of the private firms in a developing country following a major natural disaster. Disaster recovery in low-income countries is characterized by the prevalence of relief aid rather than of insurance payments; the data show this distinction has important consequences. The data indicate that aid provided directly to households correlates reasonably well with reported losses of household assets, but is uncorrelated with reported losses of business assets. Business recovery is found to be slower than commonly assumed, with disaster-affected enterprises lagging behind unaffected comparable firms more than three years after the disaster. Using data from random cash grants provided by the project, the paper shows that direct aid is more important in the recovery of enterprises operating in the retail sector than for those operating in the manufacturing and service sectors.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
    URL: Volltext  (kostenfrei)
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  • 8
    UID:
    b3kat_BV048265428
    Format: 1 Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Content: Within their sample they cannot measure broader impacts of formalization on other firms (who may prosper from not having to compete against informal firms not paying taxes), nor impacts of easier formalization on entry of new firms. Nevertheless, our results suggest that although most informal firms do not want to formalize, given the current private costs and benefits of formalizing, policy efforts that lead to relatively modest increases in the net benefits of formalizing would induce a sizeable share of informal firms to formalize
    Additional Edition: De Mel, Suresh The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (kostenfrei)
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 9
    UID:
    almafu_9959269270902883
    Format: 1 online resource (33 pages)
    Series Statement: Policy research working papers.
    Content: Many microenterprises in developing countries have high returns to capital, but also face risky revenue streams. In principle, equity offers several advantages over debt when financing investments of this nature, but the use of equity in practice has been largely limited to investments in much larger firms. The authors develop a model contract to make self-liquidating, quasi-equity investments in microenterprises. This contract has three key parameters that can be used to shift risk between the entrepreneur and the investor, resulting in a continuum of contracts ranging from a debt-like contract that shifts little risk from the entrepreneur to a pure revenue-sharing contract in which the investor absorbs much more of the risk. The paper discusses implementation choices, and then provides lessons from a proof-of-concept carried out by an investment partner, KGC Equity, which made nine investments averaging USD 3,800 in Sri Lankan microenterprises. This pilot demonstrates that this new contract structure can work in practice, but also highlights the difficulties of micro-equity investments in an environment with weak contract enforcement.
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (kostenfrei)
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  • 10
    UID:
    b3kat_BV049073875
    Format: 1 Online-Ressource
    Edition: Online-Ausg Also available in print
    Series Statement: Policy research working paper 4746
    Content: "This paper analyzes data from a randomized experiment on mean returns to capital in Sri Lankan micro-enterprises. The findings show greater returns among men than among women; indeed, returns were not different from zero for women. The authors explore different explanations for the lower returns among female owners, and find no evidence that the gender gap is explained by differences in ability, risk aversion, or entrepreneurial attitudes. Differential access to unpaid family labor and social constraints limiting sales to local areas are not important. However, there is evidence that women invested grants differently from men. A smaller share of the smaller grants remained in the female-owned enterprises, and men were more likely to spend the grant on working capital and women on equipment. The gender gap is largest when male-dominated sectors are compared with female-dominated sectors, although female returns are lower than male returns even for females working in the same industries as men. The authors examine the heterogeneity of returns to determine whether any group of businesses owned by women benefit from easing capital constraints. The results suggest there is a large group of high-return male owners and a smaller group of poor, high-ability, female owners who might benefit from more access to capital. "--World Bank web site
    Note: Includes bibliographical references , Title from PDF file as viewed on 5/12/2009
    Additional Edition: De Mel, Suresh Are women more credit constrained?
    Language: English
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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