Journal Article10.1257/AER.100.2.125
Do Traditional Institutions Constrain Female Entrepreneurship? A Field Experiment on Business Training in India
TL;DR: In this paper, a recent empirical study finds low returns to capital in female-run micro-enterprises and the primary barrier to female entrepreneurial success is limited demand for rather than supply of credit, with poor women lacking high-return means of expanding their businesses.
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Abstract: What constrains the entrepreneurial choices of poor women? Do traditional institutions pose unique barriers to business growth and profitability for female-run enterprises? The explosion of microfinance programs, which typically target poor female entrepreneurs, has drawn attention to these questions. Indeed, one view is that inadequate access to credit prevents women from undertaking high-return business activities. However, one recent empirical study finds low returns to capital in female-run micro-enterprises (Suresh De Mel, David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff 2008). Thus, another view is that the primary barrier to female entrepreneurial success is limited demand for rather than supply of credit, with poor women lacking high-return means of expanding their businesses. For instance, due to gender differences in education or business networks, women might be relatively uninformed about investment opportunities and untrained in basic cost-benefit analysis (Dean S. Karlan and Martin Valdivia 2008). A second possibility is that norms governing women’s roles in society limit women’s perceptions about what is achievable in the workplace. Even differences
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References
Women Empowerment and Economic Development
TL;DR: The authors argued that the interrelationships between empowerment and economic development are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.
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Returns to Capital in Microenterprises: Evidence from a Field Experiment
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a randomized experiment to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample, regardless of whether they apply for credit and found that the average real return to be 5.7 percent a month, substantially higher than the market interest rate.
1.1K
Returns to Capital in Microenterprises: Evidence from a Field Experiment
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a randomized experiment to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample, regardless of whether they apply for credit and found that the average real return to be 5.7 percent a month, substantially higher than the market interest rate.
What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world
TL;DR: A critical review of these studies with the goal of synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the areas in which more work is needed is presented in this paper.
Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern World: Caste, Gender, and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing Economy
Kaivan Munshi,Mark R. Rosenzweig +1 more
TL;DR: This paper explored the role of the caste system in shaping career choices by gender in Bombay using new survey data on school enrollment and income over the past 20 years and found that male working-class-lower-caste networks continue to channel boys into local language schools that lead to the traditional occupation, despite the fact that returns to nontraditional white-collar occupations rose substantially in the 1990s, suggesting the possibility of a dynamic inefficiency.
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