Over the past decade, the rise of blockchain technology has led to the emergence of a growing number of decentralized platforms that are governed less by platform owners and more through community efforts. The emergence of blockchain platforms offers a unique opportunity to examine alternative structures for platform governance and to develop a theory around the value of centralized, semi-decentralized, and decentralized governance. Drawing on mechanism design theory, we evaluate the tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization and hypothesize semi-decentralization as a higher performing governance structure. Empirical evidence from the blockchain industry shows that decentralization has an inverted U-shaped relationship with platforms’ market capitalization, developer attention, and development activity. We further examine factors driving the decentralization of platform governance and find that digital platforms of the infrastructure layer—relative to those of the application layer—have a tendency to become more decentralized. This tendency, nevertheless, can be offset by experienced leaders to achieve semi-decentralization. Overall, this study contributes new insights on the characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of effective platform governance.

month. The disproportionate loss of work hours by the self-employed from racial minority groups during the COVID-19 pandemic in a developing country context calls for a closer examination and assessment of the long-term impact of COVID-19 on racial minorities.Plain English Summary Large-scale evidence from Brazil: racial minorities lost more hours per month than other groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. Racial minorities face systemic discrimination in setting up and developing their businesses, especially in developing countries. We test whether during the COVID-19 pandemic self-employed racial minorities in Brazil lost more hours of work relative to employed racial minorities. We create a matched sample of employed and self-employed individuals based on age, sex, education categories, COVID-19 self-reported symptom index, income deciles, house ownership categories, week of the interview, state of the interview, and industry. We find that across racial minority groups, the hours lost by the self-employed were substantive during the pandemic, signaling that Brazilian policymakers should pay greater attention to the relief funds allocated to and policies geared towards self-employed racial minorities.

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We present evidence on the long-term relationship between the breadth (the proportion of households) and depth (the amount per household) of public assistance and the prevalence of self-employment in US neighbourhoods. The analysis of decennial data of 71,437 census tracts over four decades (1970 to 2000) shows that the poverty ratio lowers self-employment, and that breadth (but not depth) of public assistance mitigates the negative relationship between the poverty ratio and self-employment. The results are robust to alternate model specifications and are informative about the distributional effects of welfare spendings.

Though challenges to female entrepreneurship are widely acknowledged in the settings of developed countries or the context of formal firms, the challenges faced by female informal entrepreneurs in developing markets are less explored. Based on the liabilities of newness and smallness framework in organizational ecology, we draw on a sample of 2562 Brazilian informal firms, to examine the unique differences in the experience of newness and smallness between male and female informal entrepreneurs. With increasing firm age, female informal entrepreneurs realized lower firm revenues (inverted-U), however, the firm age and firm revenue association are linear for males. Informal firm performance did not vary by size between male and female informal entrepreneurs. The distinctive differences in firm revenues for male and female entrepreneurs have implications for informal entrepreneurship.