Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the average marginal return to capital in our sample is 9.4 percent per month, microentrepreneurs reported in the top third of the community are estimated to have marginal returns to capital between 24 percent and 30 percent per month. Further we find evidence that community members distort their predictions when they can influence the distribution of resources. Finally, we demonstrate that simple mechanisms can realign incentives for truthful reporting.

Do the repayment requirements of the classic microfinance contract inhibit investment in high-return but illiquid business opportunities among the poor? Using a field experiment, we compare the classic contract which requires that repayment begin immediately after loan disbursement to a contract that includes a two-month grace period. The provision of a grace period increased short-run business investment and long-run profits but also default rates. The results, thus, indicate that debt contracts that require early repayment discourage illiquid risky investment and thereby limit the potential impact of microfinance on microenterprise growth and household poverty.

Poor entrepreneurs must frequently choose between business investment and children's education. To examine this trade-off, we exploit experimental variation in short-run microenterprise growth among a sample of Indian households and track children's education and business outcomes over eleven years. Treated households, who experience higher initial microenterprise growth, invest more in education and are one-third more likely to send children to college. However, only literate households experience child schooling gains and their enterprises stagnate in the long-run. In contrast, illiterate treatment households experience long-run business gains but declines in children's education. Our findings suggest that microenterprise growth has the potential to reduce relative intergenerational educational mobility.

Do impact investors seek impact, or merely “impact wash”? We provide systematic evidence on the nonfinancial determinants of impact investing. Impact investors focus on firms aligned with the priorities of the federal government and disproportionately invest in economically disadvantaged regions. While we find high levels of coinvestment between impact and traditional investors, we also show that impact investors influence the strategies of their traditional coinvestors, are more likely to fund firms in nascent industries, and invest countercyclically. Finally, we characterize investment heterogeneity based on a novel classification of impact investment theses, with a focus on climate, environment, and jobs and equity.

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own (versus husbands') accounts. Relative to the accounts only group, women who also received direct deposit and training worked more in public and private sector jobs. The private sector result suggests gender norms initially constrained female employment. Three years later, direct deposit and training broadly liberalized women's own work-related norms, and shifted perceptions of community norms.