IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/4538.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

License to sell : the effect of business registration reform on entrepreneurial activity in Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Bruhn, Miriam

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of business registration regulation on economic activity using micro-level data. The identification strategy exploits the fact that a recent business registration reform in Mexico was introduced in different municipalities at different points in time. Using panel data from the Mexican employment survey, I find that the reform increased the number of registered businesses by 5 percent in eligible industries. This increase was due to former wage earners opening businesses. Former unregistered business owners were not more likely to register their business after the reform. Moreover, employment in eligible industries went up by 2.8 percent, and people who were previously unemployed or out of the labor force were more likely to work as wage earners after the reform. Finally, the results imply that the competition from new entrants lowered prices by 0.6 percent and decreased the income of incumbent businesses by 3.2 percent.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruhn, Miriam, 2008. "License to sell : the effect of business registration reform on entrepreneurial activity in Mexico," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4538, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4538
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2008/02/28/000158349_20080228163807/Rendered/PDF/wps4538.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    E-Business; Labor Policies; Competitiveness and Competition Policy; Business Environment;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4538. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.