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"This paper tests whether demand shocks affect firm dynamics. Ferraz, Finan and Szerman (2015) examine whether firms that win government procurment contracts grow more compared to firms that compete for these contracts but do not win. They assemble a comprehensive data set combining matched employer-employee data for the universe of formal firms in Brazil with the universe of federal government procurement contracts over the period of 2004 to 2010. Exploiting a quasi-experimental design, they find that winning at least one contract in a given quarter increases firm growth by 2.2 percentage points over that quarter, with 93% of the new hires coming from either unemployment or the informal sector. These effects also persist well beyond the length of the contracts. Part of this persistence comes from firms participating and winning more future auctions, as well as penetrating other markets."

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"Women play a key role in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where women make up the majority of those who are entrepreneurs. However, a range of impediments render women's businesses less productive and having fewer employees than those owned by men. This new report seeks to focus attention on the challenges that Africa's women entrepreneurs face and identify practical solutions. The report draws on new, high-quality, household and firm level data to present the clearest evidence to date about the barriers to growth and profitability faced by women entrepreneurs. The report offers policy makers evidence-based guidance on designing programs to target multiple obstacles and improve the performance of women entrepreneurs."

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"Gender lens investing (GLI) - investing with the goal of making financial returns and a positive impact on women - is on the rise. Stories of new funds and promising investments are shared widely, signaling the growth of this trend. We wanted to know exactly how big the gender lens investing ecosystem is and how fast it is growing. So, in October of 2017 we researched and published Project Sage: a Landscape of Structured Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Private Debt Vehicles with a Gender Lens. Recently, we conducted a second landscape analysis, Project Sage 2.0, to assess the current state of the field and to understand how things had evolved over one year. This report presents the results of our survey and analysis of private equity, debt, and venture capital funds that operate with a gender lens. The landscape captures the field through July 2018, when our data collection for this report ended."

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"This whitepaper presents Endeavor's "house view" on proactive ideas and measures that the government, policymakers and business community, who understand the importance of protecting the essential high-growth innovation sector of the Nigerian economy, should consider as we work collectively to minimise the impact of the coronavirus and protect Nigeria's economic future."

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"A broad literature has found that the misallocation of entrepreneurial talent has strong effects on productivity. To investigate whether the government can improve entrepreneurial activity, we analyze a policy aimed at promoting innovative startups through the provision of funding and technical assistance to potential entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We conduct a survey and use regression discontinuity methods to identify the effects of the policy. We find significant effects on enterprise creation and survival as well as on employment. Overall, we show that small-scale public policy can help entrepreneurs overcome a wide variety of barriers to firm entry and improve the allocation of their entrepreneurial talent."

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"Given the mixed evidence for the impact of various publicly funded initiatives that aim to foster entrepreneurial activity, this paper empirically examines the efficacy of publicly funded business advisory services in relation to entrepreneurial outcomes. Based on a sample of 228 early-stage firms, of which 101 used business advisory services focused on helping companies secure 1st rounds of financing and start generating revenues, we examine the firm-level impact such services can have on sales growth, innovation, finance and alliances. We find services are positively associated with firms' sales growth, patents, finance and alliances. We assess statistical and economic significance, and assess robustness to controls for the non-randomness of the firm's using business advisory service program, as well as endogeneity of advisors' hours spent with firms. Other robustness checks are also included. We find significant robustness of hours spent on sales and finance, but sensitivity of the effect of hours on patents and alliances after controlling for endogeneity."

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"This piece distills critical lessons that cut across geographies and sectors and provides vital information for enterprises and funders trying to unlock impact at scale. Pivoting to Impact builds on in-depth Case Studies that share the scaling journeys of three organizations that have completed their IIA-funded work. Each organization has a unique story to tell about its strategies, pivots, successes, and failures on the road to scale."

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"We study the information-gathering role of a startup accelerator and consider the accelerator's incentives to choose a portfolio size and disclose information about participating ventures. We show that in a rational-expectations equilibrium, the resultant portfolio size is smaller than the first-best (efficient) level, consistent with some real-world observations. We further show that when some signals are uninformative and the portfolio consists of mostly high-quality ventures, the accelerator may choose to disclose only positive signals (and conceal negative signals) about its portfolio firms - a strategy we refer to as partial disclosure. Moreover, coupled with pursuing this strategy of partial disclosure, we demonstrate that the accelerator may possess incentives to exit its portfolio firms early."

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"The authors set out to document, understand and disseminate good practices in policies for social enterprises, and ultimately to contribute to the development of the sector in Latin America and globally. The book introduces a model of how to position the issue on the public agenda in a way that responds to the most urgent social needs of the country and the sector, building on existing local policies as well as those from other countries, and involving stakeholders in permanent dialogue. The Road to Travel, aimed at public policymakers and key sector players, includes 34 cases of best practices in public policy and a strategy to move faster to address our most intractable problems through a new economy."

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"The Poverty Probability Index (PPI) is a comprehensive, contextually-sensitive poverty measurement tool to characterize households' asset ownership and probability of living below the poverty line. The PPI questionnaires are available for individual countries and are continuously updated."

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