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Field
Paper Abstract
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Before
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After
Innovative firms with good ideas may still struggle to fine-tune them to the stage where they can
attract outside funding. We conduct a five-country randomized experiment that tests the impact
of an investment readiness program. Firms then pitched their ideas to independent judges. The
program resulted in a 0.3 standard deviation increase in the investment readiness score. Two
years later, the average impacts on firm investment outcomes are positive, but small in
magnitude, and not statistically significant. Larger and statistically significant impacts on
receiving outside funding occur for smaller firms, and for firms with lower likelihoods of
otherwise being funded.
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