Female Business Ownership and Informal Sector Persistence (India)

. . . [T]he unorganized [informal] sector has more than kept pace such that the unorganized sector’s share of employment has increase from 80.3% in 1994 to 81.5% in 2005 . . .  What is striking is the substantial increase in female-owned business from 9.2% of employment in 1994 to 18.7% of employment in 2005. 

In the graph "mfg" is probably manufacturing growth. 
From a paper by Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr, & Stephen D. O’Connell.

The explain (p. 5)

Cross-country data from the World Bank Entrepreneurship Snapshots find that India’s rate of entrepreneurship is lower than its stage of development would suggest; similar comparisons also highlight that India’s gender ratio among entrepreneurs is lower than its peers. This dual under-performance has cultural and economic antecedents, but it is starting to change. Women are making economic gains in the Indian economy, and further progress represents a tremendous growth opportunity for the country. This paper identifies how this process can contribute to persistence of the informal sector, which is an important consideration for how policy makers view and treat the informal sector.

HT: Catalina Granda Carvajal

Female Entrepreneurs in Trouble: Do Their Bad Loans Last Longer?

Credit risk depends on several factors. Among them, a quite unexplored one relates to how successful are the enforcement actions banks rely on once loans do not perform anymore. In this paper, by using detailed data obtained from the Italian Credit Register, we investigate how long does it take for a bank to get rid of bad loans. In particular, we concentrate on Italian sole-proprietorships to assess whether firm owner’s gender might affect the duration of bad loans. 

We find that loans to female firms stay more in bad status compared to male ones. These findings are robust to censoring, alternative specifications of the distribution of bad loan duration and other bank-specific control variables. However, this has not to be necessarily interpreted as evidence supporting the view that female firms are riskier. In fact, we find that, in case loans are written-off, loans to female firms exit later from banks’ balance sheet than those granted to male ones. This is consistent with the view that banks may expect to recover more from female firms and, as consequence, they persist with costly enforcement actions for longer in case they have granted a loan to a female firm.

That is from the conclusions of the paper "Female Entrepreneurs in Trouble: Do Their Bad Loans Last Longer?" by Marcucci & Mistrulli.

Female Entrepreneurship (Latin America)

Among the existing studies that examine issues related to female-owned businesses (FOBs) and male-owned businesses (MOBs), much of the attention has been devoted to finding performance differences between FOBs and MOBs (Ahl 2006). Very little attention has been directed at the broad business, institutional, and societal environments in which the entrepreneurs operate and strategize. In this study, employing World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from 23 Latin American Countries and over 14,000 unique firms, we investigate if female and male entrepreneurs face different levels of obstacles to firm growth. We document evidence that female entrepreneurs face significantly higher levels of crime and theft, corruption by local officials, financing obstacles, infrastructure obstacles, and a higher level of anticompetitive practices. We further explore the relation between gender of the business owner and firm growth measured as sales growth and employment growth. We find that after controlling for firm characteristics, industry effects, and country level macro variables, the difference of firm growth between FOBs and MOBs is statistically insignificant. Our findings should be of interest to scholars and policymakers, especially those who are in the position to influence the broad business and institutional environment.

From a new paper by Allison & Wei (February 2013).

Female entrepreneurship in Haiti

A researcher on female entrepreneurship in Haiti asks: 

I wonder if you have any suggestions for further reading as I continue my literature review? 

Her thesis work is on the social and economic outcomes of women-led entrepreneurship in Haiti. 

The literature on female entrepreneurship in Haiti is very limited, which is an opportunity and a hindrance for researchers going into that area, because of that I would start with work by Emily Chamlee-Wright on female entrepreneurship in other countries (Zimbabwe and Ghana), but her framework of analysis and findings might be useful in the Haiti context: 

• The Cultural Foundations of Economic Development: Urban Female Entrepreneurship in Ghana.

• Entrepreneurial Response to Bottom-Up Development Strategies in Zimbabwe, The Review of Austrian Economics, 18 (1): 5-28, 2005.

• Savings and Accumulation Strategies of Urban Market Women in Harare, Zimbabwe, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 50 (4): 979-1005, 2002.

This is something I wrote on the topic, and other sources of entrepreneurship in general are here. 

If you have other suggestions for her, please include them in the comments.