"We estimate the effect on business start-ups of a program that significantly speeds up firm registration procedures. The program was implemented in Mexico in different municipalities at different dates. Our estimates suggest that new start-ups increased by about 5% per month in eligible industries, and we present evidence supporting robustness and a causal effect interpretation. Most of the effect is temporary, concentrated in the first 15 months after implementation. The estimated effect is much smaller than World Bank and Mexican authorities claim it is, which suggests attention in business deregulation may be over emphasized."

"We estimate the demand for business training among entrepreneurs in Jamaica. We use either a re-framed version of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism or take-it-or-leave-it (TIOLI) offers to elicit willingness to pay for business training. We find that the majority of entrepreneurs have a positive willingness to pay for training, which suggests some scope for providers to help partially recover the costs of offering training. Our results indicate that charging a higher price for the course screens out a large share of entrepreneurs, in particular those entrepreneurs with fewer assets, who are more risk-averse business owners, and those who do not expect to benefit as much from the training. Providing a credit option does not affect take-up of the course. We find that higher willingness to pay is correlated with higher attendance, and conditionally on paying a positive price, those who are offered higher prices are more likely to attend, pointing to psychological or sunk-cost effects. However, this does not fully compensate for the reduction in participation in training due to the extensive margin effect of charging higher prices. Finally, we find some evidence that business training encourages higher adoption of business practices and improves business knowledge.

Our follow-up survey suffered from high attrition, which limits our ability to detect impacts on sales and profits. We do not see that effects are stronger for entrepreneurs paying higher prices or with higher willingness to pay, but a lack of statistical power also means that we cannot rule out the possibility that those
who pay higher prices do benefit more. We conclude that the optimal price for governments to charge may therefore lie somewhere in between free or nominal cost and market price, and depend on how governments trade-off equity and efficiency."

"In Mexico, microenterprises and SMEs make up 99 percent of firms, employ about 64 percent of the workforce, and account for more than 40 percent of GDP. Given the importance of SMEs in the economy, governments in Mexico over the past twenty years have established a wide variety of SME support programs. How effective these SME programs have been in achieving their objectives is unclear.

This paper evaluates SME support programs in Mexico using a panel of firm-level data for two groups of firms-a treatment group that participated in SME programs and a control group that did not. The panel data have been created by linking SME program participation information to a large panel of annual industrial surveys (1994-2005) maintained by Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography."

"As part of an effort to increase the evidence related to youth entrepreneurship in the Arab world, the ILO has joined with regional partners to create the Taqeem initiative. Taqeem provides support for the rigorous evaluation of youth interventions and disseminates findings and recommendations on “what works” in youth employment. As part of the Taqeem initiative, a global research team was assembled to evaluate the impact of an innovative youth entrepreneurship reality TV show in Egypt called El Mashrou3, produced and directed by the international NGO Bamyan Media. Bamyan defines the primary objective of the show as: to use the power of mass media to inspire a new generation of youth entrepreneurs. This is achieved through broadcasting messages about entrepreneurship skills and good business practices. In addition to producing the show, Bamyan Media carried out support activities to create a bridge between El Mashrou3 and the real world. A website was created so that viewers could access online courses, educational videos and mentoring services. Public viewing parties and networking events were also organized.

This report has several purposes. The first is to set out clearly for the study team and for interested parties all the details involved in selecting the study population, including details of the random selection process used. The second is to summarize information from the baseline survey to give a picture of the types of young people involved in the study. Finally, the report provides background information about the TV show itself, the contestants and the content of the episodes. It should be noted that only minimal data are presented from the baseline survey, as data continue to be collected, improved and analysed."

"Effective human capital formation through the medium of entrepreneurship education and training (EET) is of increasing concern for governments, as EET is growing rapidly across the world. Unfortunately, there is a lack of consistent evidence showing that EET helps to create more or better entrepreneurs. We undertake the first quantitative review of the literature and, in the context of human capital theory, find that there is indeed support for the value of EET. Recommendations to improve the quality of future work in the field are provided."

"We conduct a randomized experiment that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Combined with detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 16-26% higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in output per hour relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality products that take longer to produce. Instead, we find evidence of learning-by-exporting whereby exporting improves technical efficiency.

First, treatment firms have higher productivity and quality after controlling for rug specifications. Second, when asked to produce an identical domestic rug using the same inputs and same capital equipment, treatment firms produce higher quality rugs despite no difference in production time. Third, treatment firms exhibit learning curves over time. Finally, we document knowledge transfers with quality increasing most along the specific dimensions that the knowledge pertained to."

"In this paper, we carry out a literature review of the studies investigating the factors that affect the performance and growth of clean technology start-up firms. The importance of clean-tech start-ups lies in their mission to protect the environment by facilitating the increased use of clean energy and environmentally friendly solutions. At the same time, the entrepreneurial nature of many of these firms enables introduction of radical innovations necessary for making breakthroughs in the industries of renewable energy and environmental technology that in turn are essential for the industry development. Given their significance, there are surprisingly few studies with the focus on the factors affecting the growth of clean-tech start-ups. Our search in leading management, entrepreneurship and energy journals has yielded a total of 13 articles, almost all of which focus on such external factors as policies. We argue that this gives us an incomplete picture of the factors enabling a clean-tech firm's development. As clean-tech firms are a subset of the population of new technology-based firms (NTBFs), we draw on the literature dealing with the factors that promote growth of NTBFs in order to build our framework for structuring the results. The analysis uncovers what future research areas can be pursued in order to gain a more balanced understanding of what enables the development of a clean-tech start-up. We suggest that in addition to the macro-studies of policies and regulations, future research needs to examine the individual and firm-specific factors, e.g. characteristics of the clean-tech entrepreneurs, teams, governance mechanisms and network structures. Furthermore, the existing focus on the environmental and innovative performance of clean-tech start-ups should be complemented by examining the alternative firm outcomes related to e.g. financial performance, social identity, alliance portfolio and internationalization."

"In this brief, we respond to a question from the Argidius Foundation about the return on investment for accelerators: At the Argidius Foundation, we assess the return on total investment (ROTI) of the capacity development programs that we support. What can your data tell us about the return on investment for accelerator programs?"

"In this data brief, we explore financing for ventures working in different regions and sectors around the world using data from the Entrepreneurship Database Program. In this report, we respond to a question from the Global Innovation Fund about startup financing by sector and geography: At the Global Innovation Fund, we are focused on supporting entrepreneurs and innovators in markets where individuals earn less than $5 per day. What sectors/verticals and what geographies are typically getting funding in the data that you're seeing?"

"In this brief, we use data from the Entrepreneurship Acceleration Research Initiative in order to respond to the following question by Steve Cumming of the MasterCard Foundation about Youth Entrepreneurship: At The MasterCard Foundation, we have a portfolio of youth entrepreneurship projects that we support in Sub Saharan Africa. We're always looking for data to better understand the space and to inform our programming. I'm wondering if you could share any data by ages 18-24 and 25-30, and by African country or region if possible. Do you see anything interesting under these parameters?"