What Do Market-Access Subsidies Do? Experimental Evidence from Tunisia

We are grateful to Tunisia’s Center for Export Promotion (CEPEX) for collaboration and to the Tunisian customs agency and National Institute of Statistics for facilitating data access. For funding, we thank the World Bank Impact Evaluation to Development Impact (i2i) fund, the Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) initiative, the President’s Global Innovation Fund of Columbia University, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (grant no. G-2023-21088). Verhoogen thanks Princeton University for hospitality while part of this research was carried out. We received excellent research assistance from Xiaoya Gao and Skander Maraoui and valuable support from Massimiliano Cali, Zouhour Karray, Mariem Malouche, Bob Rijkers, and Jade Salhab of the World Bank. We thank Riadh Ammari, Costas Arkolakis, Alexandre Arrobbio, Miriam Bruhn, Aidan Coville, Francisco Campos, Florian Grosset, Juan Carlos Hallak, Djibrilla Issa, Asma Bouraoui Khouja, Mariana Lopez, Monika Mrazova, Marcelo Olarreaga, Tristan Reed, Bernard Salanié, Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr, Grigorios Spanos, Olga Timoshenko, Anna Vitali, Christian Volpe Martincus, and many seminar participants for valuable comments. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone; we are responsible for any errors. The Tunisian government’s expenditures on the Tasdir+ program were funded in part by a loan from the World Bank. Rahman was on staff of the World Bank when the project was designed and implemented. The AEA RCT Registry ID is AEARCTR-0003347. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
• randomized controlled trials registry entry