Nicholas Swanson

Job title: 
PhD Candidate
Department: 
Department of Economics
Research interests: 
Fellowship Year(s): 2022
Project/Theme Title: Kinship pressure and employee selection
Language: French, Language: Italian
Abstracts: Firm growth is seen as a pathway to economic development for Sub-Saharan African countries. However, most firms in Africa remain small, and “the vast majority of microenterprises have no employees outside the owner’s family” (Jayachandran 2020). Most economists understand the propensity to hire relatives as arising from contracting frictions, a lack of trust and missing information markets, and argue that fixing these markets could help foster firm growth. However, a substantial literature in anthropology suggests that firms hire relatives not as the optimal response to contracting frictions, but rather as a result of kinship pressure or mutual insurance arrangements (Kennedy 1988, Akyeampong et al. 2014).This project proposes the first empirical test of whether social pressure and mutual insurance arrangements are partly responsible for the predominance of relative hirings among microenterprises and will quantify the productivity losses from such pressures, by conducting a field experiment with business owners in Eastern province, Zambia.
Fellowship Year(s): 2021
Project/Theme Title: Kinship pressure and employee selection
Language: French , Language: Italian
Abstracts: Firm growth is seen as a pathway to economic development for Sub-Saharan African countries. However, most firms in Africa remain small, and \the vast majority of microenterprises have no employees outside the owner's family" (Jayachandran 2020). Most economists understand the propensity to hire relatives as arising from contracting frictions, a lack of trust and missing information markets, and argue that fixing these markets could help foster firm growth. However, a substantial literature in anthropology suggests that firms hire relatives not as the optimal response to contracting frictions, but rather as a result of kinship pressure or mutual insurance arrangements (Kennedy 1988, Akyeampong et al. 2014).This project proposes the first empirical test of whether social pressure and mutual insurance arrangements are partly responsible for the predominance of relative hirings among microenterprises and will quantify the productivity losses from such pressures, by conducting a field experiment with business owners in Eastern province, Zambia.

Country Expertise:

Language Expertise:

French,Italian