Financial literacy, role models, and micro-enterprise performance in the informal economy
基于人力资本和社会学习理论，分析金融素养和榜样如何影响厄瓜多尔739家非正规经济微型企业的绩效，发现金融素养预测财务绩效但不预测增长，榜样预测资产回报率但不预测其他指标。
This article analyses how financial literacy and role models contribute to explaining the performance of micro-enterprises in the informal economy. Grounded in human capital reasoning and social learning theory, we argue that financial literacy and personal knowledge of role models lead to improved firm performance. We test our hypotheses on a unique dataset of 739 micro-enterprises in Ecuador. We find that financial literacy is an important predictor of financial performance but not growth, and the use of role models predicts return on assets but not other performance metrics. Our results have implications for future work on micro-enterprises and the nature of the human and social capital of their founders.