Thai Enterprise Panel Survey (http://cier.uchicago.edu/data/enterprise-survey.shtml)

The Thai Enterprise Panel Survey (TEPS) examines the life cycle of firms -- how businesses are born, grow, and ultimately succeed or fail. First fielded in 2010, households in urban areas across six provinces are resurveyed quarterly to capture changes in enterprise and to better understand their impact on economic growth. Ultimately, TEPS will provide comprehensive and important data on enterprise that has been missing up to this point. The survey is the product of a partnership with the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC). Funding is generously provided through the John Templeton Foundation.

Townsend Thai Project (http://cier.uchicago.edu)

The Townsend Thai project brings together one of the most detailed and longest running panel datasets in the developing world collected by the Thai Family Research Project (TFRP) and secondary data archived by the University of Chicago – University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) Research Center for researchers around the world. The project originated from a series of reflections about the relationship, and sometimes the lack of it, between rigorous academic research and policy creation. The Townsend Thai project thus emerged as a means to understand the broader economic and social context in which policies are enacted and research is conducted.

The project’s goal is to provide rich data that academics and policy-makers can use to better understand household activities and behavior, as well as their relationship to the broader regional and national economy. The project also seeks to facilitate the integration of theory with measurement. Frequently, the necessary data are not available for researchers because many existing surveys do not include variables critical for theoretical models. The Townsend Thai data, a panel database derived from micro surveys designed from a theoretical perspective, fills this gap.

The Townsend Thai data is available through an online archive at http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/rtownsend. Information on other databases providing information on Thailand is also available through the University of Chicago - UTCC archive at http://uc.utcc.ac.th/.

Yale’s Economic Growth Center (http://www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/)

The Economic Growth Center at Yale conducts two large scale panel surveys in Ghana and in Tamil Nadu, India, and collects data on entrepreneurial activities. Using this empirical data, the Center seeks to understand the pathways through which social and political institutions influence patterns of economic growth and entrepreneurship in particular, keeping in mind that these activities themselves may influence social and political institutions. The relevant portion of the Economic Growth Center’s survey can be found at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/8NonfarmEnterprise.pdf.

MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) (http://www.povertyactionlab.com/)

The Poverty Action Lab at MIT has several research projects focused on evaluating the effectiveness of microfinance programs and helping policymakers shape successful strategies to combat poverty. J-PAL is currently evaluating a training program in India that prepares the poorest of the poor to become microfinance clients. Research in the Dominican Republic focuses on small and medium-sized enterprises in the credit gap – enterprises too large for microcredit, yet too small for formal banking systems. This project examines the success of technical and financial support for enterprises, and the results will help in implementing future training programs in emerging markets. For a complete listing of the Poverty Action Lab’s research initiatives, please visit http://www.povertyactionlab.org/projects/.

Computation Institute

Economic modeling is computationally intense, a fact which has led to a gap between the development of theory and its validation. The Computation Institute (http://www.ci.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago provides leadership on three projects that promise tremendous contributions to the field of economics.

• Computational Economic Modeling: The first project seeks to reorganize existing model codes to better integrate them with high performance computing, interaction, and scale-up, as well as create new models using more efficient computational techniques and advances in economics. This will allow economists to estimate the parameters of economic models and to test theoretical models. Using these new tools and techniques, economic models and simulations that previously took days to process can now be processed in significantly less time.

• Data Exploration Web Tool: The second project aims to make these resources available to researchers and policymakers using a web based interface and the geographical information system (GIS) (http://age3.uchicago.edu:8080/thailand/). This will allow for geographic and spatial analysis by researchers both within and outside the Initiative for large geographical areas, making it easier to search for patterns. The GIS framework will allow analysis of socioeconomic data to be coupled with analysis of biophysical and climatological parameters extracted from satellite imagery and remote sensing data.

• Database Archive: The Enterprise Initiative aims to combine all available information on given countries or regions into a research infrastructure that allows for easy, speedy generation of summary statistics, preliminary tables, and maps. Furthermore, the Enterprise Initiative will utilize GIS to enable understanding of the spatial dimensions of wealth creation and enterprise development and allow for the creation of visual representations of the important role of enterprise in wealth creation for policymakers and public audiences.