Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary This paper hypothesizes that many productive firms in poor countries stagnate due to informational barriers to winning wholesale contracts. A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>We hypothesize that many productive firms in poor countries stagnate due to informational barriers to winning wholesale contracts. To investigate, we gave a randomly chosen subset of Liberian firms vouchers for a seven day-long training program. The program teaches how to craft competitive bids on contracts from corporations, governments, and other large buyers that are awarded through a formal tender process. Firms that participate bid on and win more tenders; bid on and win more non-tender contracts; and win contracts of higher quality. These benefits are concentrated among firms with access to the Internet. We use a simple model to highlight two mechanisms through which Internet use can convert contract-winning knowledge into access to demand: by mechanically giving firms access to additional contracts—typically tenders—that are publicized online, and by facilitating search and communication with all buyers. Both help explain our results, but the former mechanism appears more important for Liberian firms’ ultimate performance. We show this by exploiting variation in the composition of demand. When online demand is low, trained firms with Internet access win more non-tender contracts. When online demand is high, trained firms with Internet access instead win more tenders; win higher-quality contracts; and appear to earn higher revenue. Overall this paper establishes how and why the complex procedures used to award wholesale contracts exclude firms in poor countries from value chains.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables Results Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Citation for use in academic references
