03. Journals

2,963 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2210

These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 338

Borrower Leakage from Costly Screening: Evidence from SME Lending in Peru

(Elsevier, 2021-11) Arraiz, Irani ; Bruhn, Miriam ; Roth, Benjamin N. ; Ruiz-Ortega, Claudia ; Stucchi, Rodolfo

We provide evidence that commercial lenders in Peru suffer leakages in their loan approval process. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, we find that receiving a loan approval from the bank causes loan applicants to receive offers from other financial institutions as well. Competing lenders captured almost three quarters of the new loans to previously financially excluded borrowers. Importantly, many of these borrowers never took a loan from our partner bank, even after our partner bank approved them. Lenders may therefore underinvest in screening new borrowers and expanding financial inclusion, as their competitors reap some of the benefit. Our results highlight that information spillovers between lenders may operate outside of credit registries.
The Labor Productivity Gap between Formal Businesses Run by Women and Men

(Taylor and Francis, 2020-09-20) Islam, Asif ; Gaddis, Isis ; Palacios López, Amparo ; Amin, Mohammad

This study analyzes gender differences in labor productivity in the formal private sector, using data from 126 mostly developing economies. The results reveal a sizable unconditional gap, with labor productivity being approximately 11 percent lower among women- than men-managed firms. The analyses are based on women’s management, which is more strongly associated with labor productivity than women’s participation in ownership, which has been the focus of most previous studies. Decomposition techniques reveal several factors that contribute to lower labor productivity of women-managed firms relative to firms managed by men: Fewer women-managed firms protect themselves from crime and power outages, have their own websites, and are (co-)owned by foreigners. In addition, in the manufacturing sector, women-managed firms are less capitalized and have lower labor costs than firms managed by men.
Corruption as a Self-Reinforcing Trap: Implications for Reform Strategy

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-07) Stephenson, Matthew C.

Corruption is widely believed to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, in the sense that the incentive to engage in corrupt acts increases as corruption becomes more widespread. Some argue that corruption's self-reinforcing property necessarily implies that incremental anticorruption reforms cannot be effective, and that the only way to escape a high-corruption equilibrium “trap” is through a so-called “big bang” or “big push.” However, corruption's self-reinforcing property does not logically entail the necessity of a big bang approach to reform. Indeed, corruption's self-reinforcing property may strengthen the case for pursuing sustained, cumulative incremental reforms. While there may be other reasons to prefer a big bang approach to an incremental approach, this conclusion cannot be grounded solely or primarily on corruption's self-reinforcing character.
Six Sigma to Reduce Claims Processing Errors in a Healthcare Payer Firm

(Taylor and Francis, 2020-06) Sunder M, Vijaya ; Kunnath, Nidhin R.

As a continuous improvement practice, Six Sigma has been accepted globally across the service industry. In the past one decade, the application and success of Six Sigma in healthcare services has been remarkable. Despite the fact that several papers on Six Sigma have appeared in the erstwhile literature related to healthcare operations, there is a dearth of field studies highlighting the application of Six Sigma in healthcare outsourced firms, in specific to healthcare payers that engage in a non-clinical setup. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of Six Sigma within the healthcare payer outsourced firms, where error-free delivery becomes critical. The article contributes to the literature of Six Sigma in healthcare outsourcing highlighting how “Six Sigma as a methodology” could help reduce claims adjudication errors in a healthcare payer firm. The Six Sigma DMAIC project case study presented as part of the paper delivered a saving of USD 0.53 million and is a classic example of how Six Sigma can bring bottom-line impact to healthcare outsourced organizations. Managerial implications and lessons learned are discussed alongside the concluding notes.
Call Me Maybe: Experimental Evidence on Frequency and Medium Effects in Microenterprise Surveys

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Garlick, Robert ; Orkin, Kate ; Quinn, Simon

This study analyzes the effects of differences in survey frequency and medium on microenterprise survey data. A sample of enterprises were randomly assigned to monthly in-person, weekly in-person, or weekly phone surveys for a 12-week panel. The results show few differences across the groups in measured means, distributions, and deviations of measured data from an objective data-quality standard provided by Benford’s Law. However, phone interviews generated higher within-enterprise variation through time in several variables and may be more sensitive to social desirability bias. Higher-frequency interviews did not lead to persistent changes in reporting or increase permanent attrition from the panel but did increase the share of missed interviews. These findings show that collecting high-frequency survey data by phone does not substantially affect data quality. However, researchers who are particularly interested in within-enterprise dynamics should exercise caution when choosing survey medium.
Informed Trading in Business Groups

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Pedraza, Alvaro

Business groups, which are collections of legally independent companies with a significant amount of common ownership, dominate private sector activity in developing countries. This paper studies information flows within these groups by examining the trading performance of institutional investors in firms that belong to the same group. Using a novel dataset with complete transaction records in Colombia, this paper estimates the difference in returns between trades of asset managers in group-affiliated companies and trades of non-affiliated managers in the same stocks during the same period. The data show that affiliated managers display superior timing ability and that their trades outperform those of non-affiliated managers by 0.85 percent per month. The evidence suggests that institutional investors with group affiliation access information that is only available to members of the group. In order to limit the use of private information, financial authorities might need to expand their disclosure rules to monitor the trades of group-affiliated investors.
Economic Transformation in Africa from the Bottom Up: New Evidence from Tanzania

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Diao, Xinshen ; Kweka, Josaphat ; McMillan, Margaret ; Qureshi, Zara

Tanzania's rapid labor productivity growth has been accompanied by a proliferation of small, largely informal firms. Using Tanzania's first nationally representative survey of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs)—this paper explores the nature of these businesses. It finds that these firms are located in both rural and urban areas and that they operate primarily in trade services and manufacturing. Roughly half of all business owners say they would not leave their job for a full-time salaried position. Fifteen percent of these small businesses contribute significantly to economy-wide labor productivity. The most important policy implication of the evidence presented in this paper is that if the goal is to grow MSMEs with the potential to contribute to productive employment, policies must be targeted at the most promising firms.
Is There a Cost-Effective Means of Training Microenterprises?

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Brooks, Wyatt ; Donovan, Kevin ; Johnson, Terence R.

Despite billions of dollars spent by policy institutions and academics, very few programs designed to increase managerial skills among microenterprises are cost-effective. This short paper highlights a mentorship program designed to provide managerial skills to Kenyan microenterprises, and it provides a detailed cost-benefit analysis. For each dollar spent on a treated firm, average profit increases by 1.63 USD; the result stems from both a higher program impact and lower cost relative to existing training programs. Motivated by this increased cost-effectiveness, the study then compares the program to the large literature focusing on “supply-side” interventions designed to increase managerial capacity in small firms, and it highlights particular margins on which mentorship improves on classroom training and also where training should focus.
Medium-Run Impacts of Management Training in Garment Clusters

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Higuchi, Yuki ; Mhede, Edwin Paul ; Nam, Vu Hoang ; Sonobe, Tetsushi

This paper investigates the impact of management training programs on garment clusters in Vietnam and Tanzania. The study found that in the medium run firms showed improvement once they had identified useful practices and adapted them to their operations. Although it takes a few years to experience a significant impact on incomes, management training can increase not just management scores but also incomes or value added.
Taxing the Good? Distortions, Misallocation, and Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa

(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Cirera, Xavier ; Fattal-Jaef, Roberto ; Maemir, Hibret

This paper uses comprehensive and comparable firm-level manufacturing censuses from four Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to examine the extent, costs, and nature of within-industry resource misallocation between heterogeneous production units. This paper finds evidence of severe misallocation in which resources are diverted away from high-productivity firms towards low-productivity ones, although the magnitude differs across countries. Estimated aggregate productivity gains from the hypothetical equalization of marginal returns range from 30 percent in Côte d’Ivoire to 160 percent in Kenya. The magnitude of reallocation gains appears considerably lower when performing the same counterfactual exercise based on the World Bank Enterprise Surveys once the value-added shares of industries are adjusted using the census data. This suggests that linking firm-level survey data to aggregate outcomes requires census-type data or sampling methods that take the true structure of production into account.