Ben Roth is an assistant professor of business administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, teaching The Entrepreneurial Manager to MBA students. He is a development economist that employs both economic theory and field experimentation to pursue questions in two overlapping agendas: understanding and relaxing the constraints to small-scale entrepreneurship in the developing world, and understanding how investors should behave when they have both financial and social preferences.
Ben earned a BA in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in economics from MIT.
Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: Dominant Individual Rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if every pre-existing strategy is weakly dominated by some strategy within the marketplace. We study applications to the design of labor markets and the sharing economy. We also provide a general construction to achieve approximate DIR across a wide range of marketplace designs.
A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of households in dire circumstances as well as for setting appropriate consumer protection policies. We conduct a simple experiment in three sites in which we paid off high-interest moneylender debt of individuals. Most borrowers returned to debt within six weeks. One to two years after intervention, treatment individuals were borrowing at the same rate as control households.
Roth, Benjamin N. "Market Design Under Weak Institutions." In More Equal by Design: Economic Design Responses to Inequality, edited by Scott Duke Kominers and Alex Teytelboym. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
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A rapidly increasing share of asset allocation decisions incorporate social values in addition to financial considerations. We argue that the most common strategies for socially motivated investing, which only consider the social value of the firms in an investors' portfolio, are misguided. We develop a tractable framework in which commercial and social investors compete, and identify alternative strategies for social investors that result in higher social welfare and deliver higher financial returns. We discuss several normative implications for socially-motivated investors. From the enterprise perspective, we demonstrate that a focus on increasing profitability can have a greater social impact than a focus on direct social value creation
I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to “pure” philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants and when financed by investments. The analysis yields two heuristics to guide impact investors. First, investments allow a financier to discipline inefficient spending. Second, investments may enable a social enterprise to exploit new opportunities for profit and may increase the enterprise’s scale relative to when grant financed. I quantify these heuristics for the case of Husk Power, a social enterprise that has received impact investment.
Irani Arraiz, Miriam Bruhn, Benjamin N. Roth, Claudia Ruiz-Ortega and Rodolfo Stucchi
We provide evidence that commercial lenders in Peru free ride off their peer’s screening efforts. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, we find competing lenders responded to additional loan approvals by issuing approvals of their own. Competing lenders captured almost three quarters of the new loans to previously financially excluded borrowers. Importantly, many of these borrowers never took a loan from our partner bank, even after our partner bank approved them. Lenders may therefore underinvest in screening new borrowers and expanding financial inclusion, as their competitors reap some of the benefit. Our results highlight that information spillovers between lenders may operate outside of credit registries.
Microentrepreneurs in low-income countries have widely varying marginal returns to capital, yet identifying those with the best opportunities remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the average marginal return to capital in our sample is 11% per month, microentrepreneurs reported to be in the top third of the community are estimated to have marginal return to capital between 23% and 35% per month. We cannot reject that microentrepreneurs ranked in the middle and bottom terciles of the community have a marginal return to capital of zero. Further we find evidence that community members distort their predictions when they can influence the distribution of resources. Finally we demonstrate that appropriately designed elicitation mechanisms can realign incentives for truthful reporting. These methods may be useful for using community information to target resources in other contexts, especially when targeting based on predicted treatment effects or when community members may have incentives to distort their predictions.
Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the interest rate but also implicit restrictions on types of investment. We build a dynamic model of informal lending and show this may lead to endogenous debt traps. Lenders constrain business growth for poor borrowers yet richer borrowers may grow their businesses faster than they could have without credit. The theory offers nuanced comparative statics and rationalizes the low average impact and low demand of microfinance despite its high impact on larger businesses.
With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem. At the beginning, Prime’s role as a financial intermediary involved seeking out the most promising market-based technology solutions to climate change and recruiting foundations or philanthropists to fund them. In 2019, Prime changed course, adopting a portfolio approach with its Prime Impact Fund. By the end of the year, Prime had raised $40 million in philanthropic capital for its new fund. Once the funds were invested in promising energy startups, Prime planned to try its hand at recruiting traditional investors to back the same companies. Could Kearney convince traditional investors that these investments were worth the risks?
In October 2016, SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese conglomerate giant caused a significant shock to the worldwide market for venture capital and private equity by announcing the Vision Fund, the largest tech investment fund in the world at close to $100 billion. The reputation of legendary SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son depended on the success of the Vision Fund, a considerable challenge given the difficulties associated with organizing a large pool of capital, investing at scale, and generating VC-style returns. By effectively anointing category leaders and deterring competitive entry, would the Vision Fund accelerate innovation or undermine the market forces that have typically produced social value by spurring rapid technological change?
In January 2018, Husk Power had just raised $20 million to scale operations for a second time. From 2007 through 2013, Husk built 80 biomass waste (primarily rice husk from rice mills) plants that provided electricity to 250,000 villagers and shop owners spread across 350 villages in India and Africa.
By 2015, Husk underwent a major pivot. Rather than a rural electrification vision aimed at providing power to rural households through biomass gasification alone, Sinha envisioned plants organized around village commercial customers that used biomass gasification, solar energy, and battery power in tandem, allowing for power generation nearly 24-7. To bring this vision to reality, Sinha ceased operations of nearly all of the existing plant locations and began the conversion to new locations built around the “new” hybrid plant. Thus in 2015, Husk was operating a mere 10 power plants and serving roughly 2,000 customers, down from the 80 plants and roughly 250,000 customers they had prior to this shift.
After downsizing and reorganizing operations, was Husk Power once again ready to scale?
Roth, Benjamin N., Joseph B. Lassiter III, and Natalia Rigol. "Husk Power: Scaling the Venture." Harvard Business School Case 819-069, December 2018. (Revised January 2020.)
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