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Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Study Withdrawn No
Intervention Completion Date October 14, 2019
Data Collection Complete Yes
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization) 1054 firms: randomization at the firm level
Was attrition correlated with treatment status? No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations 1054 firms (of which 697 were reinterviewed in the follow-up survey)
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms 297 control firms 757 treatment firms
Public Data URL https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/4033
Is there a restricted access data set available on request? No
Program Files Yes
Program Files URL https://microdata.worldbank.org/index.php/catalog/4033
Data Collection Completion Date May 14, 2020
Is data available for public use? Yes
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Papers

Field Before After
Paper Abstract Why do more small firms in developing countries not use the market for professional business services like accounting, marketing, and human resource specialists? Two key reasons may be that firms lack information about the availability of these services, and that they struggle to distinguish the quality of good versus bad providers. A brand recognition exercise finds that most small firms are unaware of most providers in this market, and a survey of service providers reveals that they largely rely on word-of-mouth and informal reputation mechanisms for acquiring customers. This study set up a business services marketplace that contains information about the different providers present in the market and used mystery shopper visits to develop a quality ratings system. A randomized experiment with more than 1,000 firms provided access to this marketplace to the treatment group and randomized whether firms received just information or also quality ratings. The provision of quality ratings information shifts small firms’ preferences over which provider they would like to use, increasing the average quality rating of their preferred providers by 0.2 to 0.4 ratings points out of 5. However, neither the provision of information nor these quality ratings had any significant impact on the likelihood that small firms go on to hire a business service provider over the subsequent six months. The results suggest that alleviating information frictions alone is insufficient to increase usage of professional business services.
Paper Citation Anderson, Stephen and David McKenzie (2021) What Prevents More Small Firms from Using Professional Business Services? An Information and Quality-Rating Experiment in Nigeria. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 9614
Paper URL https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/407751617722646649/pdf/What-Prevents-More-Small-Firms-from-Using-Professional-Business-Services-An-Information-and-Quality-Rating-Experiment-in-Nigeria.pdf
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Field Before After
Paper Abstract Many small firms lack the finance and marketing skills needed for growth. A standard approach is to train the entrepreneur in these skills. However, rather than requiring entrepreneurs to learn everything, an alternative is to move beyond the boundary of the entrepreneur and link firms to these skills in a marketplace through insourcing workers, or outsourcing tasks to professionals. We conducted a randomized experiment in Nigeria to test the relative effectiveness of these different approaches to improving business practices. Insourcing and outsourcing both dominate business training; and do at least as well as business consulting at one-half of the cost.
Paper Citation Anderson, Stephen and David McKenzie (2022) "Improving business practices and the boundary of the entrepreneur: A randomized experiment comparing training, consulting, insourcing and outsourcing", Journal of Political Economy, 130(1): 157-209, 2022
Paper URL https://doi.org/10.1086/717044
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