IZA

A university-based entrepreneurship training in Tunisia which appeared to have impact on participants behaviours and skills but no significant impact on increasing their self-employment.

Entrepreneurship programmes have a strong positive effect on youths, particularly on labour-market activities and business-practice outcomes, and improve business knowledge and practice, particularly for existing entrepreneurs. However, there is no evidence that this translates into improved business performance and increased income.

In the context of a basic, short-term data entry job, unannounced provision of public recognition to employees yielded an economically significant increase in performance. Results suggest that recognition works best when it is provided exclusively, but not too exclusively. The performance increases in exclusive recognition are mainly driven by strong positive responses of non-recipients, which is most likely due to conformity preferences.

In the context of a fruit producer in the UK, the introduction of managerial incentives provides evidence of positive effects on worker productivity. In this context, when managers' pay is linked to the firm's performance, their interests become more aligned with those of the firm, which ultimately translates into stronger alignment of incentives of the workers they manage since the managers can target their efforts to specific workers. This also sheds some light on how managerial incentives determine earnings inequality among workers.

While research is advancing quickly in the area of business training and entrepreneurship evaluations in the developing world, many of the effects are still unknown and are highly dependent on the context.

In the context of microfinance in Sri Lanka, high variance in returns may limit the willingness of banks to lend to microenterprises, but it remains a puzzle why incremental growth and reinvestment remains such a challenges as many firms have exhibited a high level of returns.

This entrepreneurship education programme with final year primary school students in the Netherlands showed significant effects on student's non-cognitive entrepreneurial skills following the intervention.