There are a multitude of government programs that directly try to help particular firms to grow. Business training is one of the most common forms of such support. A key concern when thinking about the impacts of such programs is whether any gains to participating firms come at the expense of their market competitors. E.g. perhaps you train some businesses to market their products slightly better, causing customers to abandon their competitors and simply reallocate which businesses sell the product. This reallocation can still be economically beneficial if it improves allocative efficiency, but failure to account for the losses to untrained firms would cause you to overestimate the overall program impact. This is a problem for most impact evaluations, which randomize at the individual level which firms get to participate in a program.
In a new working paper, I report on a business training experiment I ran with the ILO in Kenya, which was designed to measure these spillovers. We find over a three-year period that trained firms are able to sell more, without their competitors selling less – by diversifying the set of products they produce and building underdeveloped markets.
This is the eleventh in our series of posts by students on the job market this year
Researchers, policymakers and aid organizations have devoted lots of attention to improving access to credit and, increasingly, insurance for small firms and farms in developing countries. Yet some recent papers find puzzlingly weak effects of insurance and credit on growth and profits (Cole et al. 2014, Banerjee et al. forthcoming).
One potential explanation may be that in developing countries, it’s not just financial markets that have imperfections, but that other key markets, such as markets for labor and land, have problems, too. In particular, high costs of supervising or finding trustworthy employees may make it expensive to add labor (Eswaran and Kotwal 1986, Fafchamps 2003, Foster and Rosenzweig 2011). For farms specifically, missing land markets may further constrain expansion (Goldstein and Udry 2008, Adamopoulos and Restuccia 2014).
A while back I blogged about work using active choice and enhanced active choice to get people to get flu shots and prescription refills. The basic idea here is that relatively small modifications to the way a choice is presented can have large impacts on the take-up of a program. This seemed useful in the context of many of our training programs– attendance rates averaged 65 percent in a review of business training programs I did with Chris Woodruff. Therefore for an ongoing evaluation of the GET AHEAD business training program in Kenya, we decided to test out this approach.