2021 Theses Doctoral

Three Essays on Enabling Entrepreneurial Growth in Low-Income Economies

Carlson, Natalie

While entrepreneurship is frequently touted as an engine for macroeconomic growth, and there is increasing policy interest in promoting entrepreneurship in lower-income countries, aspiring entrepreneurs in developing regions face unique constraints on their ability to grow successful businesses. This dissertation contains three empirical essays studying the factors that enable and constrain entrepreneurial growth in low-income contexts, drawing on data from a randomized field experiment studying an entrepreneurial training program in Zimbabwe. The first essay examines how entrepreneurial training impacts key hinge decisions on whether to continue pursuing an initial business idea, or to pivot to a new opportunity. The second essay studies how entrepreneurial training impacts subjective well-being, and the reasons why it might not track neatly with economic outcomes. The third essay studies innovation in the context of small informal enterprises, using text-based machine learning methods.