Leonardo Iacovone

TL;DR: In this article, the existence of an unconditional gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa was shown and when key observable characteristics of the enterprises or individuals are taken into account the gender gap disappears.

TL;DR: This article examined product-level dynamics within firms in the context of Mexican trade integration under NAFTA and confirmed the existence of within-firm product heterogeneity, showing that new exporters enter foreign markets with a small number of varieties, most of which were previously sold at home, and with a very small export small volume.

TL;DR: It is shown that teaching entrepreneurial skills to the self-employed works much better in terms of increasing both sales and profits, and the psychology-based personal initiative training approach is cost-effective, paying for itself within 1 year.

TL;DR: The authors developed a new model of multi-product firms which invest to improve the perceived quality of both their individual products and their brand, and Mexican data provide robust confirmation of the model's key prediction: firms in differentiated-good sectors exhibit quality-based competence (prices fall with distance from core competence), but export sales of firms in non-differentiated good sectors exhibit the opposite pattern.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the questions of what determines success and survival beyond the first year and find that survival probability rises with the number of firms exporting the same product to the same destination from the same country, pointing towards the existence of cross-firm synergies.