Gender Specific Distortions, Entrepreneurship and Misallocation

Ashantha Ranasinghe

No 2023-1, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: Women account for a small share of all business owners and a small share of the market in India's manufacturing sector. To account for these patterns, I estimate the extent of gender-specific distortions to operating a business using firm-level data. Feeding these estimates that differ across gender into a standard framework of heterogeneous producers replicates key features of the firm size distribution, on aggregate and across gender. While women face higher entry barriers into entrepreneurship, they have modest impacts on female market shares when there are sharp differences in distortions across gender along the intensive margin of entrepreneurship. Policies that promote female entrepreneurship are effective, yet have only modest impacts on aggregate productivity. These findings are not unique to India, and apply across a broader set of countries.

Keywords: gender; entrepreneurship; misallocation; productivity; micro data. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 O10 O40 O50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2023-01-12, Revised 2023-07-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-lab and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~econwps/2023/wp2023-01.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Gender specific distortions, entrepreneurship and misallocation (2024)
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:ris:albaec:2023_001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joseph Marchand ().