In my work exploring these questions I focus on banks and microcredit institutions that lend to small firms and are constantly pulled in the opposite directions of standardization and flexibility, as documented by a long research tradition in finance. I straddle levels of analysis and combine rich ethnographic data with longitudinal loan-level datasets from lending organizations. I also exploit different sources of exogenous variation, such as random loan officer rotations, exogenous determinants of branch locations, or natural variation in loan officer enforcement styles

Well-functioning institutions are necessary preconditions for economic development. But endogenous institutional change is, by definition, difficult. In two separate papers, I use matched-case comparisons that follow change efforts from their early stages to advance our understanding of systemic change. Both papers take an “inhabited institutions” approach to study how individuals relate to systems in the attempt to purposefully change them.

Public safety is a fundamental precondition for entrepreneurial activity and economic development. Yet, the local police forces that are the first, indispensable lever of public safety face myriad challenges, but no clear framework to inform integral police reform. With a variety of institutional partners and funding we launched a research program to study police forces as organizations. Our research agenda explores questions of organizational design, the path to effective reform, and the adequate integration of evidence-backed practices into existing police organizations.

While job creation is one of the main reasons why policymakers seek to promote entrepreneurship, practically no research has looked at the quality of startup jobs. In two papers, we begin to explore the issue, combining different methods.