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- May 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Teaching Note
Independent Governance of Meta’s Social Spaces: The Oversight Board
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 823-111.
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- March 2023 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
Independent Governance of Meta’s Social Spaces: The Oversight Board
Julie Owono is a member of the Oversight Board, an outside entity with the authority to make binding decisions on tricky moderation questions for Meta's companies. She considers the Board's impact, and its future.
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- January 2023
- Case
Year Up: Measuring and Scaling Impact
Year Up, a non-profit that provides training and practical work experience to low-income young people, has for years prioritized impact measurement. By 2022, it had built a robust body of evidence demonstrating that its program yields higher earnings for participants....
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- 2022
- Working Paper
What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?
In recent years, impact investors – private investors who seek to generate simultaneously attractive financial and social returns – have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Does the Invisible Hand Efficiently Guide Entry and Exit? Evidence from a Vegetable Market Experiment in India
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Greg Fischer, Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe and Benjamin N. Roth
What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers
of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the
market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Social Protection and Social Distancing During the Pandemic: Mobile Money Transfers in Ghana
By: Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, Benjamin N. Roth and Christopher Udry
We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income
Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers
affects neither consumption, well-being, nor social distancing. Once disbursed,...
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- March 2022
- 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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- March 2022
- Article
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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- January 2022
- Teaching Note
A Close Shave at Squire
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Benjamin N. Roth and Michael Norris
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 821-073.
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- December 2021
- Article
India's Food Supply Chain during the Pandemic
By: Matt Lowe, G.V. 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 69% 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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Keywords:
COVID-19;
Supply Chain;
Health Pandemics;
Food;
Policy;
System Shocks;
Food and Beverage Industry;
India
- November 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Husk Power: Scaling the Venture
By: Benjamin N. Roth and Natalia Rigol
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 819-069.
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- November 2021
- Article
Borrower Leakage from Costly Screening: 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 suffer leakages in their loan approval process. Leveraging a discontinuity in the loan approval process of a large bank, we find that receiving a loan approval from the bank causes loan applicants to receive offers...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Loan Officers Impede Graduation from Microfinance: Strategic Disclosure in a Large Microfinance Institution
By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth
Graduating borrowers from microcredit to larger loans represents an important
opportunity for increasing livelihoods. We demonstrate that loan officers impede borrower
graduation due to common features of their compensation. We implement an
experiment with 243 loan...
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- September 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation
By: Benjamin Roth
- July 2021
- Case
A Close Shave at Squire
In 2020, just after closing a $34 million Series B financing round, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon consider how to adjust their business, Squire Technologies, to the new realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their barbershop technology, including tools to run a shop...
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- June 2021
- 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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- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Technical Note
Impact Investment, Catalytic Capital and Blended Finance
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital
By: Daniel Green and Benjamin N. Roth
Portfolio allocation decisions increasingly incorporate social values. We develop a tractable framework to study how competition between investors to own socially valuable assets affects social welfare. Relative to the most common social-investing strategies, we...
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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
- 2021
- Working Paper
Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Enterprises
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. Impact...
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