Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals?: Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status

doi:10.1080/07350015.2017.1305276

Publication:
Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals?: Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status

dc.contributor.author	McKenzie, David
dc.date.accessioned	2019-01-10T21:11:29Z
dc.date.available	2019-01-10T21:11:29Z
dc.date.issued	2017-06-20
dc.description.abstract	A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of U.S. $50,000 each, is used to elicit ex-post beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the percent chance they would be operating a firm, and the number of employees and monthly sales they would have, had their treatment status been reversed. The study finds the control group to have reasonably accurate expectations of the large treatment effect they would experience on the likelihood of operating a firm, although this may reflect the treatment effect being close to an upper bound. The control group dramatically overestimates how much winning would help them grow the size of their firm. The treatment group overestimates how much winning helps their chance of their business surviving and also overestimates how much winning helps them grow their firms. In addition, these counterfactual expectations appear unable to generate accurate relative rankings of which groups of participants benefit most from treatment.	en
dc.identifier.citation	Journal of Business and Economic Statistics
dc.identifier.doi	10.1596/31139
dc.identifier.issn	0735-0015
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10986/31139
dc.publisher	Taylor and Francis
dc.rights	CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO
dc.rights.holder	World Bank
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo
dc.subject	BUSINESS GROWTH
dc.subject	RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT
dc.subject	SUBJECTIVE EXPECTATIONS
dc.subject	ENTREPRENEURSHIP
dc.subject	BUSINESS PLANS
dc.subject	BUSINESS GRANTS
dc.subject	FIRM ENTRY
dc.title	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals?	en
dc.title.subtitle	Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status	en
dc.type	Journal Article	en
dc.type	Article de journal	fr
dc.type	Artículo de revista	es
dspace.entity.type	Publication
okr.associatedcontent	https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07350015.2017.1305276 Journal website (version of record)	en
okr.associatedcontent	https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/24505 Working paper version (pre-print)	en
okr.crossref.title	Can Business Owners Form Accurate Counterfactuals?: Eliciting Treatment and Control Beliefs about Their Outcomes in the Alternative Treatment Status
okr.date.disclosure	2019-01-10
okr.doctype	Publications & Research::Journal Article
okr.doctype	Publications & Research
okr.externalcontent	External Content
okr.guid	106161550209859145
okr.identifier.doi	10.1080/07350015.2017.1305276
okr.identifier.doi	10.1596/31139
okr.identifier.report	134669
okr.journal.nbpages	714-22
okr.language.supported	en
okr.peerreview	Academic Peer Review
okr.region.administrative	Africa
okr.region.country	Nigeria
okr.topic	Private Sector Development::Business Development Services
okr.topic	Private Sector Development::Business Environment
okr.topic	Private Sector Development::Enterprise Development & Reform
okr.topic	Private Sector Development::Microenterprises
okr.topic	Private Sector Development::Private Sector Economics
okr.unit	DECFP
okr.volume	36(4)
relation.isAuthorOfPublication	148d6d6d-76e5-5d6f-9af9-98313e30551f
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery	148d6d6d-76e5-5d6f-9af9-98313e30551f