Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 320

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 23 of the 23 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka

Open access
de Mel, Suresh, McKenzie, David, Woodruff, Christopher·2013·American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Abstract

A field experiment in Sri Lanka provides informal firms incentives to formalize. Information about the registration process and reimbursement of direct costs does not increase registration. Payments equivalent to one-half to one month (alternatively, two months) of the median firm's profits leads to registration of around one-fifth (alternatively, one-half) of firms. Land ownership issues are the most common reason for not registering. Follow-up surveys 15 to 31 months later show higher mean profits, but largely in a few firms that grew rapidly. We find little evidence for other changes in behavior, but formalized firms express more trust in the state. (JEL C93, D22, L25, L26, O14)

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1257/app.5.2.122

Cites

23 of 23 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 23 references

Metadata

Authors
de Mel, S., McKenzie, D., & Woodruff, C.
Venue
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Published
2013-01-01
Volume
5
Issue
2
Pages
122-150
ISSN
  • 1945-7782 (ISSN-L)
  • 1945-7790
OpenAlex
W2130264014
Cited by
320
References
23
FWCI
48.10
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/app.5.2.122
The paper
de Mel, S., McKenzie, D., & Woodruff, C. (2013). The Demand for, and Consequences of, Formalization among Informal Firms in Sri Lanka. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.5.2.122

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.