"What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, we place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. Within the treatment group, we match individuals and firms in batches using a deferred-acceptance algorithm. We show how this allows us to identify heterogeneous treatment effects by firm and intern. We find striking heterogeneity in self-employment effects, but almost no heterogeneity in wage employment. Estimates of marginal treatment effects (MTE) are then used to simulate counterfactual mechanism design. We find that some assignment mechanisms substantially outperform random matching in generating employment and income effects. These results demonstrate the importance of treatment heterogeneity for the design of field experiments and the role of matching algorithms in intervention design."

"The start-ups with the most potential to innovate and generate employment are the ones most likely to rely on capital provided by outside investors. Several institutional developments including the rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions, have meant that founders seeking this type of capital increasingly pitch their business ideas to investors in group settings, raising the question of whether the order in which ideas are pitched affects outcomes. Research on order effects in other competitive environments indicates that judges often have high expectations and calibrate their evaluations to the lower average performance of competitors at the beginning of competition, making it difficult for those going early to do as well as those performing later. We test empirically whether this calibration effect is also present for efforts by founders to pitch investors by conducting a field experiment. Entrepreneurs participating in elevator pitch competitions were randomly assigned the position in which they pitched. We find evidence of this calibration effect: investor-judges expressed substantially lesser interest in pursuing investment in the first and second ventures pitched to them."

"The World Economic Forum is pleased to release Leveraging Entrepreneurial Ambition and Innovation: A Global Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Competitiveness and Development, which examines the relationship of entrepreneurship and competitiveness from a fresh perspective. The report builds on and advances our extensive previous work on this issue. The study described in this report combines two unique data sets, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index data, which ranks the economic competitiveness of 144 economies, and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s assessment of entrepreneurial activity across 70 economies."

"In this study, we evaluate the effect of innovation promotion programs administrated by the Colombian Innovation Agency (COLCIENCIAS). The evaluation focuses on programs that provide financial incentives for research and development (R&D)-matching grants and contingent loans-and encourage the formation of linkages among firms, universities, and other public research organizations. We use longitudinal firm-level data and adopt a fixed effects identification strategy to control for potential selection biases. The findings show that COLCIENCIAS financial incentives have increased labor productivity as a result of gains in total factor productivity (TFP) due to product diversification and, to a lesser extent, of capital intensification."

"This report is part of a wider study that aims to unpack the contribution of Gender Lens Investing in women’s economic empowerment, and builds on the existing literature on the understanding of the finance gap for women-owned enterprises in developing countries. It is based on insights gathered from 200+ women entrepreneurs across Kenya, Rwanda, India and Indonesia. While analysing the factors affecting access to finance for women entrepreneurs, the report touches upon its effect on their lives in terms of impact on their agency, bargaining power, ability to challenge patriarchal attitudes, and financial independence, through examples. The report posits a segmentation framework to bring out the differentiated characteristics, needs and challenges of women-owned businesses businesses."

"The global spread of Covid-19 has made being an entrepreneur more challenging than ever. Although it seems like a crisis unlike any other, the pandemic has many lessons to offer entrepreneurs working with underserved communities in low income markets. The Manual to Land by MIT D-Lab aims to help entrepreneurs to better navigate crisis leadership while focusing on finances, the team or the customer side."

"We study the effects of explosive growth in the Bangladeshi ready-made garments industry on the lives on Bangladeshi women. We compare the marriage, childbearing, school enrollment and employment decisions of women who gain greater access to garment sector jobs to women living further away from factories, to years before the factories arrive close to some villages, and to the marriage and enrollment decisions of their male siblings. Girls exposed to the garment sector delay marriage and childbirth. This stems from (a) young girls becoming more likely to be enrolled in school after garment jobs (which reward literacy and numeracy) arrive, and (b) older girls becoming more likely to be employed outside the home in garment-proximate villages. The demand for education generated through manufacturing growth appears to have a much larger effect on female educational attainment compared to a large-scale government conditional cash transfer program to encourage female schooling."

"Business incubators have been mushrooming in the recent past. There have been various studies on the impact of business incubators to the entrepreneurs and their diverse ideas. The major objectives of the study were to determine the factors affecting success of business incubators and identify impact level of those factors. An empirical study was conducted so as to insights and ideas. European business incubator managers interviewed, questionnaires were administered. Primary data was collected through the use of interviews with experts and questionnaires were administered to the entrepreneurs in Europe. Purposeful sampling was used to derive some expert knowledge and random sampling for the entrepreneurs. Data analysis was done using measures of central tendency, correlation analysis to identify the strength of relationship between dependent and independent variables, the ANOVA and regression analysis. The researchers found out that business incubators are of vital relevance during the start-up and growth of business. The present analysis empirically evidenced that three main factors such as availability and access to external financial resources, strong social and business networks, and internal strength including resources and capabilities positively affect and have a strong relationship with the success of business incubators."

"This guide is written for social entrepreneurs who want to maximise their positive impact and want a practical approach to help them do that. By impact we mean creating changes in people’s lives. You could be already running a social enterprise or on the way to setting one up."

"This supplementary guide has been created with the aim of mapping this landscape and to generate awareness and understanding of the impact space in South Africa. This guide explores why and how organisations are measuring their impact; the benefits and challenges of impact measurement and management; how impact data is used and reported; and the future of impact measurement and management in South Africa."