A Helping Hand or the Long Arm of the Law? Experimental Evidence on What Governments Can Do to Formalize Firms
在巴西贝洛奥里藏特进行实地实验，测试信息、免费成本和检查对非正规企业注册的影响，发现检查能小幅提高正规化概率，但大多数企业除非被强制否则不会正规化。
We conducted a field experiment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to test which government actions work to encourage informal firms to register. We find zero or negative impacts of information and free cost treatments and a significant but small increase in formalization from inspections. The local average treatment effect estimates of the inspection impact are larger, providing a 21 to 27 percentage point increase in the likelihood of formalizing. The results show that most informal firms will not formalize unless forced to do so, suggesting that formality offers little private benefit to these firms.