A large fraction of the labor force in many developing countries is self-employed, but few of these self-employed individuals ever make the jump to hiring paid employees. A cross-cutting intervention will evaluate the impact of three policies aimed at helping small firm owners to make that jump.
The first is business training. The second is a wage subsidy for the first six months of hiring a new worker. The third is a matched savings program to encourage small business owners to accumulate sufficient capital to make the necessary investments needed to make an additional worker profitable.
We randomly provide these three programs to microenterprises, also interacting the treatments so that we can see, for example, whether business training has more impact if also coupled with savings, or whether wage subsidies work better for the self-employed who have receiving training on how to grow their businesses.
