A new Policy Brief titled “Female Entrepreneurship and Professional Networks” by Monica P. Lambon-Quayefio, Francesca Truffa, Edward Asiedu, and Ashley Wong investigates the effect of online networking groups on firm performance and female-owned businesses in Ghana. Find the paper for download here.
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Female Entrepreneurship and Professional Networks
Female-owned businesses continue to be smaller and less profitable than male-owned firms. We conducted an RCT in Ghana on a sample of 1,771 growth-oriented female entrepreneurs to investigate the effect of online networking groups on firm performance. We find that access to online networking opportunities leads to greater innovation, better business practices and higher profits by 26%. The increase in profits is concentrated in the upper tail of the distribution. However, three-year follow-up data reveal limited impacts on long-term firm outcomes. Our findings reveal the potential and limitations of low-cost, light-touch interventions in fostering long-term business growth for female entrepreneurs.
COVID-19 and Urban Households in Lahore, Pakistan
We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown on a sample of women who completed their undergraduate degrees from public colleges in Lahore, Pakistan. We conducted
phone surveys with 1,617 women from May to June 2020 collecting information on their own and household outcomes. Pakistan imposed a strict lockdown in March 2020, following the first recorded death in the country in the same month. We survey the respondents, on average, 10 weeks after the lockdown was first implemented, when it was beginning to be eased. The country was implementing a policy of ‘smart lockdown’, imposing stricter safety and social distancing protocols in localized areas that were deemed to have high or rising infection rates. We interviewed women belonging to urban, middle class households in Lahore. Our sample is unique in that they are highly educated – all of the women in our sample are recent college graduates – when only about 10% of the women in urban areas of Pakistan have an undergraduate or higher degree (PSLM, 2015).
Meet Your Future: Experimental Evidence on the Labor Market Effects of Mentors
We designed and randomized a mentorship program among students undergoing school-to-work transitions in Uganda. The program improved participants’ career trajectories up to a year after graduation. Using call transcripts and survey data, we find that the mentorship acted by providing information about entry-level jobs and encouragement, rather than job referrals or search capital. Consistent with this finding, mentored students lowered their reservation wages, raised their expected returns to experience, and turned down fewer job offers. These results highlight the role of distorted beliefs in prolonging youth unemployment and point to a cost-effective and scalable solution.
Informality and Poverty Dynamics
In Nigeria, informality has been on a persistent rise with an increasing number of people engaging in informal employment. Similarly, the rate of poverty and extreme poverty in the country has also been on the rise, an occurrence more evident among the working poor. However, not much is known empirically about the dynamics of both informality and poverty within the Nigerian context. Using panel data from the four waves of the Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS), this study employs the random effects panel regression model to assess the poverty implications of mobility across informal employment types, while also exploring the dynamics of informality and poverty, respectively. The results of our analysis indicate that although work is important, the quality of the work is much more crucial for the welfare of those engaged. Specifically, we find that whereas, transition between all forms of employment is negatively associated with poverty, household heads who transition from formal to informal employment are 0.8 times less likely to move above the poverty line than those who remain in formal employment. Our findings also show that persistence in informality in the country is more evident among own-account workers.
The Impact of Trade Unions on Earnings: New Evidence from Cameroon
The role of trade unions in the Cameroonian labour market is still a little discussed topic, despite the end of trade union monolithism in 1995 and the emergence of collective agreements that have been genuinely negotiated between the social partners since 2000. Using only the second Survey on Employment and the Informal Sector (EESI) − due to the unavailability to the public of data from the third wave of this survey at the time of writing − conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in 2010, this paper assesses the influence of union presence and union membership on the monthly earnings of formal and informal sector employees, highlighting the specificities of the Cameroonian industrial relations system. The empirical results – which are mainly based on the Poisson pseudo- maximum likelihood estimator – show that the presence of a trade union and/or a staff representative in a workplace has a positive and significant influence on income, except in the public sector. When the analysis is restricted to workplaces where there is at least one union, the results reveal that union membership is not an explanatory factor for the average earnings gap between union and non-union employees in the informal and public sectors. In the formal private sector, however, union members are paid less than their non-union counterparts.