Research

Selected Work in Progress

Exogenous Shocks & Entrepreneurial Performance. (2025) (With FC Eaglin, Z Kuloszewski, and J Wong). 

Manuscript in Progress

Digital Technology Diffusion, Competitive Reallocation, & Entrepreneurial Performance.

Working Papers

FinTech & Financial Frictions: The Rise of Revenue-Based Financing. (2024) (With D Russel, C Shi). Reject and Resubmit, Review of Financial Studies.

We use transaction-level data from a major payment processor in South Africa to study FinTech-provided small business "revenue-based financing". After eight months, payments through the processor are 16% lower for businesses who take financing offers than observably similar non-takers, driven by moral hazard from revenue hiding and adverse selection. Two natural experiments suggest FinTech platforms' non-lending interactions with small businesses---e.g., payment processing and inventory management---can limit both hiding and selection. By tying repayment to the continued use of non-lending products, FinTechs can mitigate enforcement and monitoring frictions. Our results help explain the rise of FinTech-provided revenue-based financing. They also provide evidence for policymakers looking to increase financial inclusion and firm growth, particularly in developing economies.

The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance. (2024) (With N Otis, S Delecourt, D Holtz, R Koning). Revise and Resubmit, Management Science.

Scalable and low-cost AI assistance has the potential to improve firm decision-making and economic performance. However, running a business involves a myriad of open-ended problems, making it difficult to know whether recent AI advances can help business owners make better decisions in real-world markets. In a field experiment with Kenyan entrepreneurs, we assessed the impact of AI advice on small business revenues and profits by randomizing access to a GPT-4-powered AI business assistant via WhatsApp. While we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that there is no average treatment effect, we find the treatment effect for entrepreneurs who were high-performing at baseline to be 0.27 standard deviations greater than for low performers. Sub-sample analyses show high performers benefited by just over 15% from the AI assistant, whereas low performers did about 8% worse. This increase in performance inequality does not stem from differences in the questions posed to or advice received from the AI, but from how entrepreneurs selected from and implemented the AI advice they received. More broadly, our findings demonstrate that generative AI is already capable of impacting—though in uneven and unexpected ways—real, open-ended, and unstructured business decisions.

Winner, Wharton People Analytics White Paper Competition (2024)

Winner AOM STR Division Best Paper Award in Industry, Competition, and Strategic Entrepreneurship (2024)

Second Place, SMS Annual Conference Best Paper Prize Competition (2024)

Nominated for the AOM Carolyn B. Dexter Award by the STR division (2024)

Media: The Economist; NPR Planet Money; VoxDev; Harvard Business School; Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard; UC Berkeley Haas.

Publications

Design of Off-Grid Lighting Business Models to Serve the Poor: Field Experiments and Structural Analysis (2024). (With BS Uppari, S Netessine, I Popescu). Management Science. Vol. 70, No. 5. Published Version. SSRN Working Paper.

A significant proportion of the world’s population has no access to grid-based electricity and so relies on off-grid lighting solutions. Rechargeable lamp technology is gaining popularity as an alternative off-grid lighting model in developing countries. In this paper, we explore consumer behavior and the operational inefficiencies that result under this model. Specifically, we are interested in (i) measuring the impact of inconvenience (of traveling to recharge the lamp) along with the impact of liquidity constraints (because of poverty) on lamp usage and (ii) evaluating the efficacy of strategies that address these factors. We build a structural model of consumers’ recharge decisions that incorporates several operational features of the low-income regions. We conducted large-scale field experiments in Rwanda in partnership with a local rechargeable lamp operator and use the resultant data to estimate and test our model. We find that the complete removal of inconvenience and liquidity constraints from the current business model results in 73% and 126% increases in both recharges and revenue, thereby suggesting that these constraints are major sources of inefficiency. By implementing simple operations-based strategies—such as starting more recharge centers, visiting consumers periodically to collect their lamps for recharge, and allowing consumers to partially recharge their lamps and pay flexibly for the recharge—more than half the benefit of completely eliminating the inefficiencies can be attained. By contrast, the price- and capacity-based strategies that vary the economic variables (i.e., the amount paid per recharge and the amount of light obtained in return) but not the operational model perform far worse than the aforementioned strategies. Overall, our analysis emphasizes the importance of managing operations effectively even in markets with cash-constrained consumers, in which firms may have a natural tendency to focus more on reducing prices.

Winner MSOM Society Award for Responsible Research (2024)

Winner INFORMS Technology, Innovation Management, and Entrepreneurship (TIMES) Best Working Paper Award (2022)

Winner INFORMS Public Sector Operations Research (PSOR) Best Paper Award

Finalist MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award Competition (2024)

Finalist POMS Applied Research Challenge Award

Finalist INFORMS Decision Analysis Practice Award

Media: Amazon Science

Competition and Gender in the Lab vs Field: Experiments from off-grid Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs in Rural Rwanda (2021). Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Volume 91, April 2021. (With R Klege, M Visser, M Barron). 

Practitioner Publications

A Smarter Way to Design Business Strategies to Serve the Poor. (2023). INSEAD Knowledge. With BS Uppari, S Netessine, I Popescu. 

Providing off-grid light to poor communities. (2022). ORMS Today. With BS Uppari, S Netessine, I Popescu. 

Entrepreneurs Bringing Light To Rural Rwanda. (2022). Wharton Mack Institute for Innovation Management. With BS Uppari, S Netessine, I Popescu. 

Gender and Entrepreneurship in the Renewable Energy Sector of Rwanda. (2020). Institute of Development Studies Bulletin. Vol. 51 No.1. With M Barron, M Visser, R Klege, A Elam, A Shankar.