[1][2] McKenzie is also a contributor to the World Bank's Development Impact blog[3] and affiliated with the International Growth Centre[4] and Innovations for Poverty Action.
[11] In another study with Hillel Rapoport in rural Mexico, McKenzie finds that migration depresses schooling attendance and attainment as boys emigrate and girls take up more household tasks.
[17] Most recently, in research with Rapoport, Albert Bollard and Melanie Morten, McKenzie has challenged concerns that educated migrants remit less, finding instead that - while results differ across destinations - more educated migrants remit on average more, with the effect within that group being mainly attributable to the higher income itself rather than to background characteristics.
[21] In further research on Indian textile plants, McKenzie, Bloom, Mahajan, Roberts and Benn Eifert find these plants to often still rely on informal management practices because of a mix of lack of both information and competition, but that the adoption of better practices leads to large and sustained gains in productivity.
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.
[25] In further work on this issue, they randomly offer both existing and potential female microentrepreneurs either the 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.
[27] Together with Woodruff and de Mel, McKenzie 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.
[29] Finally, more recently, when comparing the impact of cash and in-kind grants on the profitability of microenterprises in urban Ghana, McKenzie, Woodruff, Marcel Fafchamps, 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.