Arbraxan: /* Further research on Latin America */
'''Christopher Woodruff''' (born in [[1959]]) is an [[economist]] and Professor of Development Economics at [[Oxford University]].<ref>[https://ift.tt/2LrBveG Profile of Christopher Woodruff on the website of Oxford University. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref>
== Biography==
Christopher Woodruff earned a [[Bachelor of Arts|B.A.]] in [[economics]] from the [[University of Chicago]] in 1980, followed by a [[Master of Arts|M.A.]] in [[economics]] from the [[University of California at Los Angeles]] in 1984. In parallel, from 1981 to early 1987, Woodruff worked as economist and manager of financial planning of the Central Power and Light Company in [[Corpus Christi]]. In 1994, he earned a [[Ph.D.]] in economics from the [[University of Texas at Austin]] with a thesis on specific investments and industry location in Mexico under Dale O. Stahl, after which he took up a position as assistant professor at the [[Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies]] of the [[University of California at San Diego]], where he was promoted to associate professor and finally to full professor in 2002 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, Woodruff moved to the [[University of Warwick]], before becoming a Professor of Developing Economics at the University of Oxford in 2016. Moreover, Woodruff has been a co-director of the [[International Growth Centre]]'s Programme on Firm Capabilities since 2009<ref>[https://ift.tt/2xpQj4V Profile of Woodruff on the IGC website. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref> and has acted as scientific coordinator of the [[Department for International Development|DFID]]-[[Centre for Economic Policy Research|CEPR]] Research Programme on Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries. Additionally, Woodruff is affiliated with the [[National Bureau of Economic Research|NBER]],<ref>[https://ift.tt/2LrNEA6 Profile of Christopher Woodruff on the NBER website. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref> [[Centre for Competitive Advantage and the Global Economy]] (CAGE), [[Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development]] (BREAD), [[Centre for Economic Policy Research|CEPR]], and [[IZA Institute of Labor Economics|IZA]].<ref>[https://ift.tt/2xlzoRi Profile of Christopher Woodruff at IZA. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref> In terms of professional service, Woodruff has performed editorial duties for the ''[[Journal of Development Economics]]'', ''[[World Bank Economic Review]]'', ''[[Journal of African Economies]]'', the ''[[B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy]]'', and the ''[[Journal of Comparative Economics]]''.
== Research==
Christopher Woodruff's research interests focus on enterprises in developing countries, especially through the use of [[field experiment]]s.<ref>[https://ift.tt/2LrBveG Profile of Christopher Woodruff on the website of Oxford University. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref> In terms of research output, he ranks among the top 2% of economists registered on [[IDEAS/RePEc]].<ref>[https://ift.tt/2LrNgl8 Christopher Woodruff ranks 1039th out of 57161 economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref> In his research, Woodruff has been a frequent co-author of [[David McKenzie]] ([[World Bank]]) and [[Suresh de Mel]] ([[University of Peradeniya]]).<ref>[https://ift.tt/2xgbJ4G Google Scholar page of Christopher Woodruff. Retrieved June 29th, 2019.]</ref>
=== Research on economies of transition===
An early area of Woodruff's research has been the role of institutions such as [[rule of law]] and [[property rights]] in [[transition countries]]. For instance, together with [[John McMillan (economist)|John McMillan]], Woodruff finds that [[Vietnam]]ese firms in the 1990s were more likely to give a customer credit the more limited the customer's access to alternative credit suppliers, the longer the duration of their trading relationship and the more information it had gathered about the customer beforehand, and the better the customer is linked to business networks.<ref>McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (1999). Interfirm relationships and informal credit in Vietnam. ''Quarterly Journal of Economics'', 114(4), pp. 1285-1320.</ref> Moreover, in the absence of reliable legal enforcement, firms often agree to renegotiate contracts following a breach, implying that retaliation is not as forceful as predicted in repeated games models and not as effective as sanctions, even though community sanctions are occasionally invoked.<ref>McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (1999). Dispute prevention without courts in Vietnam. ''Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization'', 15(3), pp. 637-658.</ref><ref>[https://ift.tt/2LrNgSa McMillan, J, Woodruff, C. (2000). Private order under dysfunctional public order. ''Michigan Law Review'', pp. 2421-2458.]</ref>
Together with [[Simon Johnson (economist)|Simon Johnson]] and [[Daniel Kaufmann (economist)|Daniel Kaufmann]], Woodruff and McMillan also explore the legal system in post-communist countries. Comparing post-communist [[Russia]] and [[Ukraine]] to [[Poland]], [[Slovakia]] and [[Romania]], they find the size of 'unofficial' activity to be much larger in the former two than in the latter three, mostly due to higher effective tax rates, worse bureaucratic corruption, grater incidence of mafia protection, and less trust in the court system;<ref>Johnson, S. et al. (2000). Why do firms hide? Bribes and unofficial activity after communism. ''Journal of Public Economics'', 76(3), pp. 495-520.</ref><ref>Johnson, S., McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (2000). Entrepreneurs and the ordering of institutional reform: Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine compared. ''Economics of Transition'', 8(1), pp. 1-36.</ref> the central role of entrepreneurs in transition economies is further explored by Woodruff and McMillan in a ''[[Journal of Economic Perspectives|JEP]]'' article.<ref>McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (2002). The central role of entrepreneurs in transition economies. ''Journal of Economic Perspectives'', 16(3), pp. 153-170.</ref> Overall, Woodruff, Johnson and McMillan argue that weak property rights rather than insufficient access to finance were the main binding constraint for private sector investment into post-communist countries in the 1990s, as weak property rights discourage entrepreneurs from reinvesting their profits.<ref> Johnson, S., McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (2002). Property rights and finance. ''American Economic Review'', 92(5), pp. 1335-1356.</ref> Similarly, they also demonstrate the importance of trust into well-functioning courts for investment: while relationships can sustain existing interactions, workable courts support the creation of new business relationships.<ref>Johnson, S., McMillan, J., Woodruff, C. (2002). Courts and relational contracts. ''Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization'', 18(1), pp. 221-277.</ref>
=== Research on enterprises in developing countries===
Another key area of Woodruff's research are (micro-)enterprises in developing countries and constraints to their growth. For instance, Woodruff and McKenzie find that start-up costs of Mexican microenterprises tend to be very low and returns to capital high, suggesting that entry costs are unlikely to provide an empirical basis for poverty traps.<ref>McKenzie, D.J., Woodruff, C. (2006). Do entry costs provide an empirical basis for poverty traps? Evidence from Mexican microenterprises. ''Economic Development and Cultural Change'', 55(1), pp. 3-42.</ref> In further research, Woodruff and McKenzie randomly provided Mexican retail SMEs with cash and in-kind grants, which led to estimated returns to capital of at least 20-33% per month, with the effects being concentrated among those firms with the highest financial constraints.<ref>McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2008). Experimental evidence on returns to capital and access to finance in Mexico. ''World Bank Economic Review'', 22(3), pp. 457-482.</ref> Together with [[Luc Laeven]], Woodruff has also found a positive relationship between the size of firms in Mexico and the quality of the legal system, especially for proprietorships.<ref>Laeven, L., Woodruff, C. (2007). The quality of the legal system, firm ownership, and firm size. ''Review of Economics and Statistics'', 89(4), pp. 601-614.</ref>
Much of Woodruff's research on microenterprises has been conducted with [[Suresh de Mel]] and McKenzie in [[Sri Lanka]]. In one study, after randomly assigning cash grants to microentrepreneurs, they find annual real returns to capital of 55-63% per year, i.e., much higher than prevailing market interest rates, with the returns varying by entrepreneurial ability and household wealth, but not by risk aversion, suggesting that insufficient access to credit might not be a key constraint.<ref>De Mel, S., McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2008). Returns to Capital in Microenterprises: Evidence from a Field Experiment. ''Quarterly Journal of Economics'', 123(4), pp. 1329-1372.</ref> Faced with the difficulty of measuring profits, they find that simply asking firms about their profits offers a more accurate measure than detailed questions on revenues and expenses, as firms tend to underreport a nearly a third of their revenues, and that while providing entrepreneurs with account diaries helps address that issue, it doesn't significantly change reported profits.<ref>De Mel, S., McKenzie, D.J., Woodruff, C. (2009). Measuring microenterprise profits: Must we ask how the sausage is made? ''Journal of Development Economics'', 88(1), pp. 19-31.</ref> Moreover, the positive returns to capital are found to be completely concentrated among enterprises owned by men, a fact that cannot be explained by differences in the entrepreneurs' characteristics, but rather suggests that capital given to female entrepreneurs is more likely to be consumed or misinvested by other household members.<ref>De Mel, S., McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2009). Are women more credit constrained? Experimental evidence on gender and microenterprise returns. ''American Economic Journal: Applied Economics'', 1(3), pp. 1-32.</ref> In further work on this issue, they randomly offer both existing and potential female microentrepreneurs either the [[International Labour Organization|ILO]]'s Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) programme or a combination of SIYB training and a cash grant, then finding that the training only has an impact on business profitability for new entrepreneurs and that the impact of the combined support dissipates in the second year.<ref>De Mel, S., McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2014). Business training and female enterprise start-up, growth, and dynamics: Experimental evidence from Sri Lanka. ''Journal of Development Economics'', 106, pp. 199-210.</ref> In a comprehensive review of research on business trainings in developing countries, Woodruff and McKenzie conclude that business trainings generally have only modest impacts on existing firms, partly because firm owners' application of the taught practices is often limited, though trainings seem to help prospective entrepreneurs launch start-ups faster and better.<ref>McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2013). What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world? ''World Bank Research Observer'', 29(1), pp. 48-82.</ref> Together with McKenzie and de Mel, Woodruff has argued most microentrepreneurs ("own account workers") are more akin to wage workers than larger firm owners, suggesting that most of them - unlike e.g. [[Hernando de Soto]]'s argument - are merely waiting for wage work and unlikely to become employers.<ref>De Mel, S., McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C. (2008). Who are the microenterprise owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. de Soto. In: Lerner, J., Schoar, A. (eds.). ''International Differences in Entrepreneurship''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 63-87.</ref> Another key finding related to Sri Lankan firms is that providing informal enterprises with payments equivalent to two months of the profits of the median firm leads to registration of half of the firms, whereas the mere provision of information about the registration process and possibility of getting reimbursed for registration costs has no impact; land ownership issues are raised as the most common reason for not registering.<ref>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'', 5(2), pp. 122-150.</ref>
Finally, more recently, when comparing the impact of cash and in-kind grants on the profitability of microenterprises in urban [[Ghana]], Woodruff, [[Marcel Fafchamps]], McKenzie and Simon Quinn found a flypaper effect whereby - unlike cash - capital coming directly into the business "sticks" there, though neither type of grants has an impact on enterprise profitability when provided to female subsistence entrepreneurs.<ref>Fafchamps, M. et al. (2014). Microenterprise growth and the flypaper effect: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Ghana. ''Journal of Development Economics'', 106, pp. 211-226.</ref>
=== Further research on Latin America===
Further work by Woodruff has addressed the informal sector wage gap in [[Mexico]], [[El Salvador]] and [[Peru]] (with Douglas Marcouiller and Veronica Ruiz de Castilla),<ref>Marcouiller, D., De Castilla, V.R., Woodruff, C. (1997). Formal measures of the informal-sector wage gap in Mexico, El Salvador and Peru. ''Economic Development and Cultural Change'', 45(2), pp. 367-392.</ref> the impact of Mexican emigration on educational attainment in emigrant households (with [[Gordon Hanson]]),<ref>Hanson, G.H., Woodruff, C. (2003). Emigration and educational attainment in Mexico. San Diego: University of San Diego.</ref> the impact of migration networks on Mexican microenterprises (with Rene Zenteno),<ref>Woodruff, C., Zenteno, R. (2007). Migration networks and microenterprises in Mexico. ''Journal of Development Economics'', 82(2), pp. 509-528.</ref> and the impact of of remittances on the breadth and depth of the Mexican banking sector (with [[Asli Demirgüç-Kunt]], Ernesto López Córdova, and María Soledad Martínez Pería).<ref>Demirgüç-Kunt, A. et al. (2011). Remittances and banking sector breadth and depth: Evidence from Mexico. ''Journal of Development Ecnomics'', 95(2), pp. 229-241.</ref>
== References==
== External links==
* [https://ift.tt/2xgbJ4G Google Scholar page of Christopher Woodruff]
* [https://ift.tt/2LrBveG Profile of Christopher Woodruff on the website of Oxford University]
[[Category:Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford]]
[[Category:Development economists]]
[[Category:1959 births]]
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