Shwetlena Sabarwal

Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales revenues) and are less efficient in terms of total factor productivity, although the difference is small. However, women entrepreneurs generate the same amount of profit per unit of revenue as men. Although both male and female entrepreneurs in the region are sub-optimally small, womens returns to scale are significantly larger than mens, implying that women would gain more from increasing their scale. The authors argue that the main reasons for the sub-optimal size of female-owned firms are that they are both capital constrained and concentrated in industries with small firms.

How Do Women Weather Economic Shocks? A Review of the Evidence

Do women weather economic shocks differently than men? The evidence shows this to be the case, especially in low-income countries. The first-round impacts of economic crises on womens employment should be particularly salient in the current downturn, since women have increased their participation in the globalized workforce and therefore are more directly affected by the contraction of employment than in the past. Crises also have second-round impacts, as vulnerable households respond to declining income with coping strategies that can vary significantly by gender. In the past, women from low-income households have typically entered the labor force, while women from rich households have often exited the labor market in response to economic crises. In contrast, mens labor force participation rates have remained largely unchanged. Evidence also suggests that women defer fertility during economic crises and that child schooling and child survival are adversely affected, mainly in low-income countries, with adverse effects on health being greater for girls than for boys. In middle-income countries, by contrast, the effects on childrens schooling and health are more nuanced, and gender differences less salient. Providing women in poor households with income during economic downturns makes economic sense. This paper reviews workfare programs and cash transfers and finds that the former provide poor women with income only when they include specific design features. The latter have been effective in providing mothers with income and protecting the wellbeing of children in periods of economic downturn.

Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from the East European and Central Asian Region

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 ECA countries, this paper estimates performance gaps between male- and female-owned businesses, while controlling for their location by industry and country. We find that female entrepreneurs have significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales revenues) and are less efficient in terms of Total Factor Productivity (TFP), although this difference is very small. However, they generate the same amount of profit per unit of revenue as men. We find that while both male and female entrepreneurs in ECA are sub-optimally small, womens returns to scale are significantly larger than mens implying that they would gain more from increasing their scale. We argue that the main reasons for the sub-optimal size of female-owned firms are that they are both capital constrained and concentrated in industries with small firms.

What teachers believe : mental models about accountability, absenteeism, and student learning

The time teachers spend teaching is low in several developing countries. However, improving teacher effort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult to increase teacher effort? One possibility is that teachers are resistant to increasing effort because they do not believe their effort is suboptimal. Such beliefs may be based on their mental models on absenteeism, accountability, and student learning. This paper explores this idea using data from 16,000 teachers across eight developing countries, spanning five regions. It finds that, on average, teachers support test-based accountability and believe that they are in fact held accountable for student learning. In several countries, many teachers tend to normalize two types of suboptimal behaviors. These are (i) certain types of absenteeism, and (ii) paying extra attention to well-performing and well-resourced students. Finally, the paper shows that ideas of accountability and absenteeism are strongly framed by context in two direct ways. The first is whether teachers favor exclusively reward-based forms of accountability. The second is the degree to which they support absenteeism linked to community tasks. These results provide actionable insights on how changing teacher behavior sustainably might require reshaping underlying mental models.

Better than most : teacher beliefs about effort and ability in Uganda

Do teachers have accurate beliefs about their effort and ability? This paper explores this through a survey experiment in public-private partnership schools in Uganda, wherein teacher self-beliefs are contrasted with their beliefs about other teachers in the same school. The study finds that, on average, teachers tend to rate ability, effort, and job satisfaction more positively for themselves than for other teachers. This tendency is called high relative self-regard. The study finds no systematic evidence of high relative self-regard around perceptions of student engagement quality and available support structures. More experienced teachers are less likely to exhibit high relative self-regard, while teachers showing low effort are more likely to exhibit it. This is analogous to the Dunning-Kruger effect in psychology, except respondents rate themselves as better than most (not better than average) and variation is explored over effort (not cognitive ability). High relative self-regard is less pronounced in owner-managed public-private partnership schools, suggesting that when principle-agent problems are less severe, schools find ways to correct for inaccurate teacher self-beliefs. These results provide suggestive evidence of cognitive biases that help teachers rationalize suboptimal effort in the classroom. This in turn points to the importance of providing objective feedback to teachers about their effort and performance as one potential way to improve their performance. Teacher self-beliefs are important areas of intervention because they are likely to affect how teachers optimize their effort and training investments. Self-beliefs are also likely to affect how teachers respond to changes in incentive and accountability regimes.