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- 2021
- Working Paper
Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field
Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries 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...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
India's Food Supply Chain During the Pandemic
By: Matt Lowe, V G Nadhanael and Benjamin N. Roth
We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 62% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%. Six weeks after the lockdown began, volumes and prices had fully...
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- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Technical Note
Impact Investment, Catalytic Capital and Blended Finance
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital
By: Daniel Green and Benjamin N. Roth
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'...
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- February 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull
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....
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Keywords:
Energy Conservation;
Renewable Energy;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Venture Capital;
Investment;
Innovation and Invention;
Technological Innovation;
Mission and Purpose;
Science-Based Business;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Social Enterprise;
Energy Industry;
Technology Industry;
Green Technology Industry;
United States
- 2019
- Working Paper
Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Entrepreneurship
By: Benjamin N. Roth
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...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Free Riding in Loan Approvals: Evidence From SME Lending in Peru
By: 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...
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- June 2019
- Article
Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines
By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth
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...
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Keywords:
Borrowing and Debt;
Household;
Personal Finance;
Decision Making;
Behavior;
India;
Philippines
- December 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Husk Power: Scaling the Venture
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...
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Keywords:
Scaling;
Energy;
Entrepreneurship;
Emerging Markets;
Growth and Development;
Energy Industry;
India
- October 2018 (Revised February 2018)
- Case
Masayoshi Son and the Vision Fund
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...
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- 2016
- Working Paper
Paying for the Truth: The Efficacy of a Peer Prediction Mechanism in the Field
By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth
- 2016
- Working Paper
Rank-Based Elicitation Schemes for Relative Likelihoods of Binary Events
By: Vivek Bhattacharya and Benjamin N. Roth
- Forthcoming
- Article
Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design
By: Benjamin N. Roth and Ran I. Shorrer
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...
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- Forthcoming
- Article
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
By: Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth
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...
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