Seed Research Library

When African governments want to encourage women's entrepreneurship in rural areas, but social norms preclude women from participating, how can local leaders motivate women's participation? This survey experiment aims to identify if the endorsement of women's participation by elders, or women's groups, would increase a woman's likelihood to take part in a new business venture. Additionally, it considers what type of capacity-building initiative will also have an effect on women's participation. Through a randomized survey experiment, I will vary the type of local elite endorsing an entrepreneurial project for women, and, I will assess the relative rates of participation. I will also randomize the type of capacity-building initiative the program will implement, to see if certain types of structural support are more effective than others in mobilizing women's participation. The first step in engaging women in the entrepreneurial process involves adapting to the local context, and allying with local elites to increase access to opportunities. Through this experiment, I will uncover with whom the state should ally itself to encourage women's participation, and the types of initiatives that can best facilitate their success. 

None

It is well known that there is a significant negative correlation between ethnic diversity and economic development across countries. Countries that are divided by ethnic lines tend to have lower incomes, slower growth rates, and poorer ratings on standard human development indices. Although diversity may be socially costly, it may also be economically valuable. Diverse populations are more productive, more creative, and better at intellective tasks like problem-solving, prediction-generation, and decision- making—skills that are critical for innovation and entrepreneurship. This proposal describes a dissertation project that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to identify interventions that can enable multicultural groups, organizations, and communities in developing societies to realize the productivity gains from heterogeneity and stimulate development. Funding provided for this project would be used to support TGR/health fees and a stipend for the final year of my Ph.D. program, during which time I expect to complete the write-up of my dissertation.

A fundamental challenge facing entrepreneurs in many developing societies is to reduce the central role of political risk--including violence and coercive expropriation—in shaping opportunities and investment decisions. Simply put, individuals are much less likely to want to start businesses when the profits from such businesses-- or their very lives-- are under threat from other groups. Particularly in ethnically divided societies, the threat or reality of violence remains a major deterrent to business. In this project, we test whether the introduction of novel financial assets--- particularly "ethnic swaps" that allow individuals to credibly share exposure to ethnically -delimited political risk across groups-- can in fact mitigate incentives for ethnic conflict and instead encourage productive investment. Given large historical animosities, ethnic conflicts in a number of societies have been considered extremely difficult to resolve, in part because of the deep-seated emotions involved. Our approach will be to design a series of lab and field experiments to separate both behavioral and rational responses to the swapping of political risk across ethnic groups and to examine what role, if any, financial assets can play in reducing violence in two of the most difficult of these environments. The two field locations we choose are those with great economic potential, where businesses nevertheless face the grave threat of political violence: Ahmedabad in India, a major business center but also the scene of large-scale Hindu-Muslim rioting in the early 21st century, and Jerusalem, Israel, the geographical epicenter of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These are also areas where the challenges of historical inter-ethnic animosity and the threat of ongoing political violence are writ large, which calls not only for a novel research design but for innovative technological implementation in bringing the behavioral lab into the field. Yet, these are also locations where the problem of ethnic animosity has often been seen as unsolvable and where the potential for affecting change may be great. 

To date, entrepreneurship in rural areas, which contain roughly 45% of the world’s population, has received scanty attention compared to entrepreneurship in developed regions. While scholars in developmental economics have looked at topics ranging from microfinance to business training, quite worrisome is the shortage of research on the strategies adopted by rural entrepreneurs. Using a major eCommerce platform as the research setting, I propose to study how rural entrepreneurs strategically differentiate their businesses, engage in innovative activities, and influence other villagers to conduct entrepreneurial activities. My project will mainly make use of three methods – big data analysis, experiment, and case studies. In so doing, I aim to contribute to the entrepreneurship and strategy literature as well as advance the current understanding of rural entrepreneurship at large. 

How does return migration affect the performance of rural businesses? Migrants bring in knowledge and expertise for local business and entrepreneurship, but business talent rarely migrates or returns to rural areas, which lack access to market, resources, and information. However, recent evidence in China indicates that returning migrants are joining or starting businesses in the villages via e-commerce platforms. This study explores this new phenomenon and examines whether return migration benefits the performance of rural sellers in that region. The data consists of a highly unique panel dataset directly acquired from Alibaba's Taobao.com, combined with regional migration data and interviews.

What explains this strong negative correlation between income levels and share of employment in small establishments? The economics literature has typically focused on size-dependent policies as an explanation for the size-income relation, i.e., developing countries have laws which discriminate against large firms (only large firms pay taxes, or small scale reservation policies) which leads to misallocation of resources, lower income levels, and smaller establishment sizes. In my research I am exploring an alternative explanation for this size-income relation. The idea that I am proposing is that poor countries and states have high demand for low quality products, the production of which requires low fixed costs (no research and development expenditure, or no need for large investments in fixed capital).

Note this is an incomplete entry:

Cacao is one of the most widely traded commodities around the world, produced by millions of smallholders in the tropics. Most of the value is added in consuming countries, leaving many farmers in poverty. In recent years, cacao has experienced a process of market differentiation since chocolatiers and consumers are appreciating traditional cacao varieties for their fine taste. Differentiation is creating two alternative value chains: i) the bean-to-bar model; and ii) the differentiated-within-mainstream model. These two new business models offer an opportunity to engage farmers in shared-value chains that could potentially lift them out of poverty, while at the same time promoting the conservation of cacao’s biological diversity. This study aims at evaluating the effectiveness of the three models— mainstream, bean-to-bar, and differentiated-within-mainstream—in improving farmers’ livelihoods and protecting cacao’s diversity. It also seeks to offer a set of recommendations to these new business models, based on our expertise on certification and other market-based mechanisms, to deliver the value promise of the triple bottom line: people, planet, profit. Funds will be used mainly to conduct fieldwork with chocolate makers in the Bay Area and farmers in Latin America, and to create a platform to better connect far

Assessing the potential of entrepreneurial opportunities is challenging, regardless of whether you are an investor (Baum & Silverman, 2004) or an entrepreneur (Sørensen & Sorenson, 2003).Because of this, developing economies play a risky game when allocating public resources to startups that offer an unguaranteed promise for job- and wealth-creation. Recent theoretical and empirical work using rational heuristics (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011) offers a potentially better alternative to the current, boundedly rational process for identifying the high-potential startups from the low-potential ones. This research project aims to ompare the rational heuristics approach against the boundedly rational approach using a public policy based in a developing economy. The main goal is to discover and validate a novel approach for identification of startups with high job- and wealth-creation potential, which will help developing economies allocate their entrepreneurship-promotion resources more effectively.

This research project builds on the finding that people from underdeveloped countries have lower innovation skills than people from developed countries. Prior literature hints at the possibility that these skills may be learned through social interaction. However, empirical evidence that accounts for the transfer of innovation skills between developed countries and their underdeveloped counterparts is lacking. I plan to test the phenomenon of social learning of innovation skills between underdeveloped and developed countries. I will do this by conducting a field quasi-experiment that measures the effect that highly skilled entrepreneurial employers from a developed country have on the improvement of innovation skills of employees from a developing country. Theoretical contributions are expected to social learning theory, and to the fields of innovation and organizational behavior. Furthermore, by potentially discovering a replicable model that helps improve entrepreneurship and innovation capabilities in developing economies, I hope to make a practical contribution to future efforts of designing effective policies for economic growth. The budget of the project is $10,300.