The SME Program held its Eighth Working Group meeting at the Sloan School of Management at MIT on September 29, 2016, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The meeting convened SME Program affiliates to discuss innovative research in the SME space. 

Presenters included:

Opening remarks
Lucia Sanchez, Innovations for Poverty Action 
     
Making Entrepreneurs: The Returns to Training Youth in Hard Versus Soft Business Skills from An At-Scale Field Experiment
Paul Gertler, University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business

The Skills to Pay the Bills: Returns to On-the-job Soft Skills Training
Namrata Kala, MIT Sloan School of Management

Shortening Supply Chains for Retail Shops in Colombia
David McKenzie, World Bank

Direct and spillover effects of a business training program: Experimental evidence from urban Uganda
Meredith Startz, Princeton University

Aspirations, peer effects, and entrepreneurial role models to improve the performance of retail shop owners (Indonesia)     
Patricio Dalton, Tilburg University

Trust in the City: SMEs and local institutions in Lusaka, Zambia
Nava Ashraf, London School of Economics & Edward Glaeser, Harvard University

Necessity is the Mother of Invention: The Emergence of the Reluctant Entrepreneur in Rural Ethiopia
Giacomo de Giorgi, GSEM- University of Geneva

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design In The Field
Natalia Rigol, Harvard University