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This article studies the effect of domestic observers deployed to reduce irregularities in voter registration in a new democracy, and in particular, the response of political parties' agents to these observers. Because political parties operate over large areas and party agents may relocate away from observed registration centers, observers may displace rather than deter irregularities. We design and implement a large-scale two-level randomized field experiment in Ghana in 2008 taking into account these spillovers and find evidence for substantial irregularities: the registration increase is smaller in constituencies with observers; within these constituencies with observers, the increase is about one-sixth smaller on average in electoral areas with observers than in those without; but some of the deterred registrations appear to be displaced to nearby electoral areas. The finding of positive spillovers has implications for the measurement of electoral irregularities or analysis of data collected by observers.

We study the effect of entrepreneurial training on enterprise outcomes, in particular whether business training for (potential) entrepreneurs of small-and medium scale enterprises can lead to an increase in the number of business start-ups or an expansion in the size of existing businesses. We study this question by analyzing the results of business training programs that an NGO held in Central America between 2002 and 2005. To deal with endogenous selection into the training program, we exploit the fact that a fixed number of applicants are taken into the training program based on a pre-training score, which creates a discontinuity around which we can compare accepted and rejected applicants and estimate the effect of training with a regression-discontinuity design. We find that receiving business training significantly increases the probability that an applicant to the workshop starts a business or expands an existing business. Thus, entrepreneurial activity such as starting and expanding businesses can be fostered by training. Exploiting the fact that in the last stage the most successful participants of the program receive substantial monetary prizes (between US$ 6,000 and 15,000) we can also provide some experimental evidence that suggests the presence of financial constraints. Finally, we investigate gender differences, and find that females experience a much larger increase in the probability of starting a business if they win the monetary prize than men, suggesting financial constraints may be significantly larger for female entrepreneurs.

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Democracies depend on the support of the general population, but little is known about the determinants of this support. We investigated whether support for democracy increases with the length of time spent under the system and whether preferences are thus affected by the political system. Relying on 380,000 individual-level observations from 104 countries over the years 1994 to 2013, and exploiting individual-level variation within a country and a given year in the length of time spent under democracy, we find evidence that political preferences are endogenous. For new democracies, our findings imply that popular support needs time to develop. For example, the effect of around 8.5 more years of democratic experience corresponds to the difference in support for democracy between primary and secondary education.