A Helping Hand or the Long Arm of the Law?

• Tác giả: Gustavo Henrique de Adrade
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 611.97 Upper extremities
• Thông tin xuất bản: Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2017
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 318631
• Chủ đề: 1. BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT; 2. BUSINESS REGISTRATION; 3. FORMALIZATION; 4. INFORMALITY; 5. SMALL FIRMS

Tóm tắt

We conducted a field experiment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to test which government actions work to encourage informal firms to register. We find zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. The local average treatment effect estimates of the inspection impact are larger, providing a 21 to 27 percentage point increase in the likelihood of formalizing. The results show that most informal firms will not formalize unless forced to do so, suggesting that formality offers little private benefit to these firms.