Networks and Manufacturing Firms in Africa: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment

Marcel Fafchamps and Simon Quinn

The World Bank Economic Review, 2018, vol. 32, issue 3, 656-675

Abstract: We run a novel field experiment to link managers of African manufacturing firms. The experiment resembles the many forms of interaction that business and community organizations offer to their members. The design features exogenous link formation, exogenous seeding of information, and exogenous assignment to treatment and placebo. We study the impact of the experiment on firm business practices outside of the lab. We find that the experiment successfully created new variation in social networks. We find significant diffusion of business practices in terms of VAT registration and having a bank current account. This diffusion is a combination of diffusion of innovation and simple imitation. At the time of our experiment, all three studied countries were undergoing large changes in their VAT legislation.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhw057 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Networks and Manufacturing Firms in Africa: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Networks and Manufacturing Firms in Africa: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:32:y:2018:i:3:p:656-675.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().